Things Being Various
"Don't Zone Out, Zoom Out"
From ‘Snow’ by Louis MacNeice
World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.
Hester: Post US election, I needed a long minute. In the aftermath, strong emotions rattled the windows of my psychic house. For a little while, Fear crept under the door and hung out in my space. We circled like wild animals sharing a pen, knowing we had to tolerate one another. I needed to spend time with this fear, uninvited though it was, asking questions, getting to know what it was trying to communicate to me. I am fortunate not to be too often plagued by fear, so to have to encounter it closely was neither comfortable nor too familiar.
Fear said, “Watch out. The world is not a friendly place” and it played me tapes of evidence it had collected from around the World. The wars. The climate emergency. I felt worse, knowing it was right, and noticing that helplessness had come to stand close by.
“It’s awful” I replied. “What should I do now?”
“Stay home” Fear told me. “Tend to your garden and your children. Stay out of it”.
“That sounds nice” I said, shutting the door. “It’s safer here after all”. After a moment of quiet, this truce felt insufficient somehow. “But Fear” I continued, “what about the others?”.
“The others?” Fear scowled, incredulous. “They are not your concern. You have learned the dangers of taking responsibility for too many others. Turn away and focus on your survival”.
In my gut, Sadness stirred. Love hovered at the window, watching. “No” I said simply, reaching out to take Fear by the hand. “That is not enough. There is work to do. You are right and I know you want to protect me. It is scary, of course I’m afraid about what is happening out there, but I want to stay connected to the others. They are scared too, even the ones who seem to disagree with me about what I should be most afraid of. I don’t know what steps to take, but I know if I stay here I will only know you, even though there are many other things to feel in that scary world beyond safety. I appreciate you trying to keep me safe, but please stand aside so I can let Love in”.
Even after this, for a few days, I seemed to do what Fear wanted. I stayed close to home, near to those beings and places that give me psychic safety. The dog. My kind and supportive partner. My vibrant children. The sea, the sea, the sea.
Having grounded myself in the parts of my life that are constantly enriching, I prevented myself tipping into despair. Despair is an emotion that helplessness can take us to. But it is paralysing and needs to be given visitation only briefly. Meanwhile, I continued to work as a psychotherapist. This work requires that I take care of myself very proactively. My job relies on my being centred, stable, emotionally regulated and able to hold space for others to explore their vulnerabilities. I am tethered so that they can wobble. Sometimes the process of holding on, anchoring, grounding myself and regulating my nervous system takes more effort than at others. This moment was one such time. I knew that in order to be able to consider the welfare of others – my fellow humans who are threatened at this turbulent time – I had to really prioritise my own wellbeing.
As can happen in the kind of relational, Humanistic therapy that I practice, I was enormously helped by a client. She opened her session with her own fear and disappointment at the outcome of the presidential race, but quickly moved into how attending an astronomy class on the eve of the result had helped her. Turning her focus to the night sky, to its enormity and timelessness, learning about the gases, invisible forces and molecular masses in orbit beyond our planet; reorientated her to her existential position. We are minuscule, less than a speck inside a grain of sand against the vastness of the universe we live in, she told me.
As my client spoke, I felt my chest expand. Breathing became smooth as the muscles of my chest relaxed. I remembered how good it could feel to let go, to surrender to that which is out of our control and remember our ultimate insignificance as individuals. This moment IS important. And – it is a fraction of a heartbeat in the endless expanse of time. I thanked her for bringing this perspective to me, noting how we were inhabiting the same political moment as women. It is natural to respond by becoming hardened, angry or defensive. These states enact tension inside our bodies. I let my client know I was registering this reminder of our existential reality as a letting go in my body and she softened physically too.
We can become so intensely gripped by our investment in a particular direction in human evolution that we exhaust ourselves. This is not to say that we should give up, or stop campaigning for the future we want to see, but it is a reminder that the road we are travelling as a species is not one that any of us as individuals can determine. We are tiny. The beliefs and behaviours of a mass can tip us into taking a step in a direction that may feel ‘wrong’ to some of us. Dangerous people can become leaders. With this, for a while, we’ll feel out of alignment. Decisions being made now will impact some generations to come. And, the greater (more immense) forces beyond us will continue to move.
“Zoom out, don’t zone out” I said to my client, and heard myself for the first time. Love was speaking to me about how to hold on. It’s about staying connected to what is happening, while keeping an eye on the bigger picture.
Zooming out
When we look at the history of progressive movements, the advances are not linear.
After hundreds of years of enslavement, oppressed black people secured some rights in some areas of the States, but the institutionalisation of racism was secured using Jim Crow laws. Espousing the concept of “separate, but equal” the white law makers continued to subjugate black citizens. It took another 100 years, until 1964 to finally overturn those laws. Power is not willingly shared; equality is not given but is wrested away by the loud and consistent demands of those it seeks to exploit. Two steps forward, one back.
I zoom out in this cultural moment and see a patriarchal kickback. While on his campaign trail, the president elect asked his crowd “who do you want – the white man or the black woman?”. Thus, brazenly capitalising on generations of investment in his own position in our social structure.
Remember though she was in the running and this is where we are globally. A wise, intelligent black woman made it to the main stage, within touching distance of the most powerful political post on this little blue planet. By stepping back to take in how far we have travelled, we might regroup enough to lean into the next phase of the journey. To keep fighting, keep shouting to make ourselves heard, then passing the loud hailer to the other marginalised people whose rights and dignity are being ripped apart.
Many many generations of people have continued to press for their rights, for equality and dignity under governments that do not respect them. This is not a new predicament. We can learn from those indigenous people, those formerly enslaved people who fought their way to freedom and from the women in this country who were fiercely committed to being recognised as citizens alongside their male counterparts. The political divisions between left and right do not actually represent the full and complex experience of being human. Casting a vote does not make enemies of those who chose a different leader to the one we wanted. We are all aiming for a brighter future, we all want our children to be safe. It is frightening when we perceive ignorance, misogyny, racism and deception in those offering a route to those things, but we must also remember that in the history of time, this is a moment. It is more important than ever to keep talking to one another, to hold onto the collective nature of existing in this particular breath of time inside the infinite Universe. Knowing our values, offering compassion and support to those in our communities and resisting the urge to hide when we could be using our resources to forge ahead, is the task at hand.
I am practicing my own advice - “don’t zone out; zoom out”. The broader perspective helps us to see ourselves in context. We are not powerless if we hold onto community, to our values and our shared humanity, and despair is fleeting if we don’t follow its path to nowhere. Sometimes Fear comes in and seems to fill all the space we have. The temptation to batten down the hatches and succumb to helplessness is powerful. It is our responsibility to stay open, reach out beyond Fear, stretch our hands toward our relentless supporters Love and Determination, like all those brave champions of equality, climate action and peace before us.
Emma: We’ve not posted in a while…life happens, challenges arise and at times it seems almost impossible to write what is in your heart. For me when I write these posts it’s often because of something having been bubbling away within me, it’s been percolating away waiting for me to put finger to keyboard, to try and make sense of what’s going on inside of me as well as the world at large.
So, what’s been on my mind these past few months, whilst we’ve been absent from these pages? Probably not dissimilar to what many of us are wrestling with – WTAF is going on in this world! It seems that whichever way I look there is a thread that weaves itself through everything - it is showing me that much of my own life as well as where the world is now is about learning to hold the tension of opposites, of things being various, to occupy the space in between, to sit still and try to see if there is a third way. Carl Jung wrote in 1942 “the greater the tension, the greater is the potential. Great energy springs from a correspondingly great tension of opposites”.
I’m finding it hard to fathom and make sense of what is happening in our world. A world full of tensions and opposites, where it seems we are perfectly happy to elect corrupt men into power. Where the rights of women are being systematically stripped away. Where we seem to have lost sight of our common humanity and created more and more silos for ourselves where there is a continual compounding of “us and them” whoever them might be, but one thing for sure is “they” are not “us/me”. I’ve been asking myself how do we move into that third way which understands that it is more than us and them and it is all about the collective “we”? I know we all strive for a sense of belonging in this world and a desire for a positive sense of self – at its most basic we want to love and be loved, know and be known. However, it seems to me that for a variety of reasons, and technology is one of these, that humanity is currently on a trajectory of increasing the sense of “us and them” where we have mistaken communication for connection, and where we have in fact created smaller and smaller segments of humanity where we align ourselves to people that think and believe the same as we do. Why, because it makes us feel known and loved, particularly when so many things seem so out of our own control and out of reach.
I can often feel completely overwhelmed when I think about this and look at what’s happening and think that nothing is ever going to get better, and that humanity is basically screwed! I can feel like I am being swept along, with no real idea of how to be when things are changing around me all the time. I don’t pretend to know the answer for humanity, but the one place I can start, and where we can all start is with ourselves. When the wider world around me is in chaotic freefall, where I feel sadness, grief, disappointment and burning rage, I am learning how important it is to intentionally create clarity, a sense of groundedness in my own life so that I can live a life of joy and hope. For me to get better clarity and grounding I’m learning that I need to shut out a lot of the external noises and inputs. If you’re anything like me when your own world and the world around you is going to pot your phone and tablet often become your main source of consumption – doom scrolling here we come, and I seem to revel in it. More recently I have tried to be more intentional about what I do and view on social media, TV, who I spend my time with and how I spend my time etc. I’ve noticed that if I consume too much of these external things to soothe myself, I in fact become more mentally tired, overwhelmed, unable to make decisions and am unclear as to the path I am on or need to take – I feel like a headless chicken caught in the cross hairs of a fox and just running around in circles!
I’m really trying to create a regular habit of meditating in the morning, (love Insight Timer for this) – around 15-20 minutes and just those few minutes help me get back to myself and into my own body, before I even consider picking up my phone to do work or look at social media – the difference to my day is tangible. I used to regularly journal but haven’t done so for months and months despite the research showing that this small act of writing allows us to better process and express our thoughts and ideas, it allows us to think deeper, self-reflect and hopefully make better decisions – it has certainly helped me in the past and I am determined to pick this practice up again…I’ll let you know how I get on. I also need to find more time to write my poetry. A poet I am not, but I do find the medium a way that I can express myself creatively, make sense of myself and the world around me.
If I do some or all these things it seems easier to be able to sit in that elusive space in-between. With these apparently opposing feelings I can get glimpses of that third way – a sense of the collective “we”. One of my tensions of opposites is this chaos and clarity both co-existing in my life simultaneously – the and/both rather than the either/or. I am working on embracing the complexity, acknowledging and living with the internal contradictions and striving for a better and more nuanced understanding of myself and the world around me. What I am recognising is that it’s hard work creating that sense of clarity and groundedness when times are as turbulent as they are and that I’m not that good at it – like all of us, I am and continue to be a work in progress.
© Hester Viney & Emma Scanu, 2025