by CSW Director Rob Field
…and Disillusionment Is Your Friend
I can usually find something good in just about any situation. So it surprised me when I realized how happy I was to see the end of 2024. Bring on the New Year — it can’t possibly be worse than 2024, I heard myself saying in late December.
If you were brought up with the belief that liberal democracy is the ideal way to run a country, you can probably relate to my feelings. A lot of my ideas, values, and beliefs were shaken and some of them were crushed in 2024. Then there was Hurricane Helene, but there’s no need to go into that. The evidence of Helene’s devastation is all around us in Western N.C.
I still believe this is a beautiful world. But it’s also brutal. Put them together, and you have a brutiful world, as a work colleague put it to me last year. It’s a mashup of hope and despair, beauty and blight, love and apathy. Mass shootings and out of control wildfires co-exist alongside twinkling holiday lights at night and a fluffy blanket of newly fallen snow. It’s all part of one interwoven world. It’s lovely, harrowing, and often perplexing.
The strange gift that 2024 gave me was to shatter some illusions I’ve carried around with me for many decades. Some things about America and the wider world that I assumed would always hold true no longer do — if they ever really did. The idea that our country will keep choosing a path of progress — desiring the greatest good for the greatest number of people — is an illusion I can no longer embrace. I will miss that illusion dearly, but it’s time to let it go.
The enduring religious and spiritual traditions caution that illusions are not our friend. As long as we harbor false ideas about reality, our potential growth will be limited. As long as we don’t recognize the full truth of a given circumstance, we will fail to pursue whatever changes are necessary to welcome the future that’s waiting to be born. Too often, that’s been true for me. So it’s goodbye to unhelpful illusion, and hello to invigorating challenge.
Please join me in invoking the higher powers and practices that will support a year with less illusion and more awakening to the full reality of this brutiful world.
photo by Luis del Rio Camacho via Unsplash