The star did something cruel, there. She asked this man to dig up his deepest desires, made him believe that he could have everything he wanted - then she tore it all out of his grasp.
She made him think it was safe to want things, in full generality.
And when he felt safe to want things, he wanted - first, to be okay, himself. And he wanted his family to be okay. And then, he wanted everybody in the world to be, fundamentally, okay. To be safe, to be happy, to have room to grow to be the best versions of themselves, to have the basic security necessary to do right by one another.
Circle, grow and grow, we sang earlier; let compassion boundless roll. Yet it is so difficult to feel that compassion when you or those you love are hurting, or in danger. Our circles of concern get so, so narrow, when we don’t, ourselves, feel safe and okay. When you’re at war, for example, you usually don’t have room for much if any compassion towards your enemy - or even anyone that you suspect might be an enemy. And in that situation, this defensive stance is often adaptive and necessary - but I count compassion and empathy to be among the casualties of war.
But even in places and times of relative peace and relative plenty, it’s really quite hard for humans in a world of scarcity and conflict and danger to feel truly, lastingly safe and okay. We bruise each other moving through the world, even when we try our best to be kind. (And we don’t always manage to try.) We struggle to ensure we can be reliably fed and housed and comfortable - and sometimes this leads us to make promises we can’t actually keep, or to run ourselves ragged with work and have no spoons left over to be good to our friends, or to make moral compromises about where that food comes from. We break our fragile bodies, by accident or inevitability, by fire or by water, by very slow decay.
We are just little animals running around the surface of a big, lonely world, trying desperately to be okay.
We’re not very good at it.
We’re much better at it, in some ways, than we used to be. We’ve built things like hospitals, sprawling systems for fixing the things that go wrong in human bodies - when we can. We’ve built planes and trains and cars, landsailors and cloudrakers, that let us go where we want to be, flee peril and seek flourishing - as long as we let each other do this. Humans do such cool things, in the service of that desperate desire to be okay.
But we live our lives constrained by scarcity and danger, and we all still suffer, and we all still die.
The star in the song did something cruel, by highlighting so starkly the gap between a world where everybody is okay - and the world we are actually in.
And, I will admit, this is also what I am trying to do to all of you.
I think that a lot of the time, we bear the ongoing brokenness of the world through something like dissociation. We may wish the world were better, but we put that wish away on a shelf as an impossibility not worth thinking about. We hide behind irony or wishful thinking. We may scoff at idealists who want the thing in earnest. Sometimes we forget we wanted the thing in the first place.
This is understandable; it’s often adaptive. But this one night of the year is a time for gazing into that abyss; the things we want, and need, and cannot have. It’s a time to be in touch with the desperate human desire to be okay, and notice the ways we are not.
Perhaps, “not yet”? One reason to practice noticing the things we want is the possibility that maybe, one day, we will be able to build a world where we can have those things; and we need to know what the things are, to get there.
Another is that dissociating from your desires and your griefs is often costly and distracting; personally, I’ve found that it’s often necessary to make room for these things in order to not be immobilized by them. That’s a lot of what this next section will be - coming to terms with and processing and grieving brokenness, and mortality, and existential risk; because I think it is necessary to do this, in order to be okay in a world where these things are true.
But also, sometimes if you take the time to actively notice your wants, you will also notice that while some are beyond your grasp, some of them are things you can just have. The man in the song - along with the rest of his utopian visions, there is the simple desire to sit by a campfire and sing. The warmth of the fire, the beauty of song - these are a part of the paradise he wants, and they are something he can just have, right now, on this lonely world. It’s important to notice things like that, I think.
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