The Pause

On re-claiming spaces for calm and the magic of the everyday as instances that help us build horizons of hope in environments of confusion, anguish, uncertainty.

“Evidently something fails us. We use second-hand magic, which was lent to us at some point in our history, and that we continue to hold because that’s how it is done internationally, like being an engineer. But there is a lack of magic for daily life. As we return to it, we encounter the nakedness of being human with nothing more (Kusch, 1976).”

There is a particular sensitivity that manifests itself as a tool of lucidity in confusing and distressing environments. It is an intimate but also collective sensitivity, and it is linked more to hope than to sadness, although it is probably permeated with nostalgia. It refers to the local, the artistic and the daily life as instances that can re-signify our existence as long as they are genuine and authentic. The search for feelings that connect us with the damaged and corrupted aspects of our times from a place that drives empathy and constructive connection with that same environment, turns out to be a great challenge in the quasi-apocalyptic days that seem to be approaching.

We are in a context in which the problems that threaten us are global, they correspond to humanity and territories transversally to political divisions, although they affect us locally, intimately. How can we look at our environment from a place that incorporates the sensitivity of our bodies and affections when the threats are immeasurable, undetectable? How to connect with our strength and our power when we are isolated, in contexts of loneliness, even abandonment?

Guattari and Rolnik (2006) argue that there is a ‘mysterious protest of the unconscious’ as the realm of production of territories of existence.

“However, the nature of these territories is not arbitrary: we are constantly solicited everywhere to invest the powerful factory of serialized subjectivity, producer of these men and women who are reduced to the condition of value support (…). When in dismantling, perplexed, disoriented, we become fragile, the trend points to adopting merely defensive positions, for fear of the marginalization of which we risk being confined when we dare to create singular territories, independent of subjective serializations (Guattari & Rolnik, 2006).”

Faced with these “systems of submission much more disguised” it is essential to think about the importance of mental health and well-being in a preventive and health-related manner – what we think, what we eat, how we move – but also as gateways to think about instances in which the affective and emotional connect us with symbols that allow us to build horizons, action plans, transformation steps. Above all, positions of power and not of passivity and impotence, although from humility and not from a defensive position, but considering the possible creative potential and – not only – the threatening. A safe and conscious connection is necessary with what needs our attention to be cared for and attended to from non-commercial, competitive or speculative values. In our societies where it seems that we have been born for productivity, to transform, to dominate and profit, we should begin to ask ourselves what happens to what is static, ephemeral, what is being: the present.

“Here is the source of all truths and all chaos: everyday life. A brother is born, a family member dies, we triumph in an exam, we have bitterness or joy, all this what is. (…) We live a strange mixture of a not knowing of intimate or everyday life and an encyclopedic knowledge of the 20th century (Kusch, 1976)”.

The details, the song, the poem, the story, the message, the memory that encourages us, moves us, motivates us. We find encouragement in our roots, in our land, in our being, in contemplating the simplicity and beauty that is part of who we are and what we can build. It is time to reclaim as a right the time – the pause – that we can dedicate to honoring what composes us, in an encouraging and peaceful way, what builds calm and builds strength – internally and collectively as well.

There is the care, the watering, the ritual, the awareness of the need for a balance that not only produces but also manages to take care and this begins with learning to take care of ourselves. Learning to care for childhoods, old ages, traumas and wounds, territories, water, land and air from a place of wholeness, wisdom, different from perfection or the ideal. Recognizing and claiming our right to defend ourselves as worthy of the good and the solidarity, of love, contemplation, affection. Allow ourselves to be in silence, allow ourselves to express sadness, make room for celebration, for mourning, for dance, laughter and tears. Listen to the ballads and rounds of the airs in which we circulate, inscribe ourselves in our soil from vulnerability and strength. It is perhaps from these positions that we can singularize circulating subjectifications as a way of reappropriation and constitution of threads that find us in the form of softness (Guattari & Rolnik, 2006).

For the family, along with the embrace at a distance, in times of honoring those who are here and those who have left.

References

 Guattari, F. & Rolnik S. (2006). Micropolítica. Cartographies of desire. Madrid: Tinta Limón.

 Kusch, R. (1976). Geoculture of the American man. Buenos Aires: Fernando García Cambeiro.