As we approach the last days of August, and September looms, it has been a strange summer. That sense of strangeness is in part due to weather, which ricocheted between crispy hot, cool and smoky, and violently stormy – sometimes all within the same day.
On the other hand, that sense of strangeness seems to go a bit deeper than the vagaries of the weather. Ever get the sense something is a little off? That something is not quite right? You can’t put your finger on it, and maybe you can’t even define it. But that feeling exists nonetheless.
I am not sure if it is because of all the dog whistle politics going on right now both south and north of the border – conspiracy theories given airplay like facts by people who should (and likely do) know better.
Or maybe it’s the war in Ukraine, the wildfires in northern Canada and British Columbia causing the evacuation of major cities, or the floods in California and China which seem almost biblical in proportion.
Is it the world which is so out of whack at the moment, or just our perception of it? Maybe a little of Column A and a little of Column B. The fact is our full perception of it just lies a little out of reach, and it is hard to know where to affix the blame.
But maybe there isn’t any blame. Maybe the world is as screwed up as it always has been.
Still, I can help but feel this vague sense of anxiety compounded with an ennui I can’t explain.
In the ancient wisdom story, the philosopher Chuang Zi once recalled a dream he experienced in which he was a butterfly. In the dream, he did everything a normal butterfly would: he fluttered around from flower to flower and dipped his long nose in to taste the nectar. In that moment, he was absolutely sure he was a butterfly.
But then, he woke up and was once more himself, a man in his 50s awakening blearily from a deep sleep. This sudden change confused him, and he wondered if he was a man dreaming he was a butterfly, or actually a butterfly dreaming he was a man.
We all have that sense of disconnection from the established forms of meaning from time to time. We stop in the middle of a task trying to remember what we are doing. We can be startled by catching something out of the corner of our eye which seems quite strange only to realize a moment later it is actually something completely mundane which we have wrongly perceived. Such disconnections are common in human experience.
However, sometimes there is something else at play. Sometimes something we do not usually perceive pushes its way unbidden and undeniable into our consciousness, and we are forced to adjust the lenses of our mind’s eye to a new reality.
This is the moment we see the wildfire coming down the mountain toward our town, unstoppable and ferocious. The moment when the wave of the flood crashes down on us. And, the moment when society or culture changes, and suddenly all the old norms and rules no longer apply.
Perhaps this is such a time.
