Thursday, June 30, 2022

Pocket Utopias

The other day, Noah and I were walking down the street when we passed by a truck stopped at an intersection. It was a family vehicle—bearded dad behind the wheel, a blank-faced tween in the passenger seat—the kind of truck people buy when they have very large dogs, or snowmobiles, or they like to camp. There was absolutely nothing remarkable about this truck, except for the trans flag that had slid down the dashboard and was peeking out the front windshield.

I have no idea if anyone in that family is trans. They might have attended the local Pride march a few weeks ago, stuck the flag in the truck, and then forgotten about it. They might have gone to a queer event—it is June, after all—as leaders, participants, or allies. There was nothing about that split-second observation—stop sign, truck, trans flag—that revealed any kind of story. 

And yet: I felt my heart get lighter. It's the kind of thing that would have been nearly impossible a couple decades ago, and difficult a few years ago. A casual show of support or of identity, jumbled in among regular truck-stuff, driving around in a small town in a blue riding. It's remarkable by being unremarkable. 

This has been a tough few years (hell, it's been a tough few days), and I find that the deluge of bad news turns me into a reluctant news junkie: analyzing the latest Supreme Court decisions from a country in which I do not even live, or trying to parse wastewater Covid graphs from my local health unit despite achieving no higher than a C+ in either math or science for most of my high school career, or reading the names of shooting victims or the location of another residential school mass grave. Being online means that I hear about this stuff; being a human means that it fucks me up.

So I live for these pocket utopias, these tiny signs that things are kind of good, maybe even great. 

An aside: this year, I made a decision to stop complaining about the summer. This season is challenging on many levels, from sun-triggered migraine to unhappy anniversaries to oppressive heat. I understand one hundred percent when people are unhappy from May to September; like, I get it. Plus, there's this existential dread that hangs over every hot day, like, "you think this is hot? You just wait" and then the heat-dome goblins come and turn everything into a 43-degree hellscape.

But at the same time? I have to take a step back from being miserable, because it's so easy to default to that. Besides, there are things to truly love about this time of year. The lushness of the season is a special luxury: the flowers and the backyard gardens, the leaves on the trees. I know that many things come with a dark side—hello, pollen, my old friend—but that also implies a bright side, no?

I'm not trying to be delusional in my optimism. I can credit mindfulness and radical joy for this shift in perspective. Mindfulness has given me the tools to actually notice all the microscopic loveliness in the world; radical joy gives me permission to celebrate them, even when things are certifiably shitty. And it's not a secret that things are bad! So many lines on the graph are heading up: food prices, ambient temperatures, number of people killed in mass shootings. I'm not trying to ignore that. But also, after two years of what feels like fairly unrelenting bad news...I'm ready to grab onto whatever positivity I can find. I'm ready to seek that shit out like it's drugs, baby. 

It's the reason I joined my local climate action group. I know, on an intellectual level, that there are zero things that I can do to stop the climate crisis. The people in charge know what they should be doing, and they just...don't? Instead, they spend hundreds of millions of dollars on space rockets and buying social media platforms and union-busting, and it's bad. Or they run through another filibuster, or approve another pipeline, and it's also bad. And there's nothing we can do about! 

But it turns out that being together with people as we name the problem—grief, powerlessness, rage, bureaucratic inertia—can actually help a lot. I have felt a lot of climate grief in the last five years, and this little group of cycling nerds and retired pastors and policy wonks and gardeners has allowed me to feel like we can grieve together. It's not a quite a pocket utopia, but it's edging in that direction. 

A pocket utopia doesn't solve the problems of the world, or even the household—it is a tiny, beautiful vision of change and possibility, and a slice of an easier and more loving future. They are always all around us—the new world is coming, after all—if only we can see them roll by.

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