Expectancy
“There
are times when a feeling of expectancy comes to me, as if something
is there beneath the surface of my understanding, waiting for me to
grasp it.”
Sylvia
Plath (The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath)
Today is New Year's Eve,
2016—the very last day of a tumultuous year that most everyone I
know will be happy to see end. With every new year, we hope that
things will change for the better, but uncertainty plagues us. That
seems more true this year than any other time I can remember. There
is a restless expectancy—for some of us, it verges on excitement,
and for others, on paranoia. What's going to happen? We can feel
something building; a shift in consciousness coming, but we don't
know as yet how it will break—for good or ill. Hermann Hesse
describes the feeling well in Siddhartha: “Dreams and restless
thoughts came flowing to him from the river, from the sun's melting
rays. Dreams and restlessness of the soul came to him.”
Plath characterizes this
period of awareness of something just beneath the surface, but not
yet grasped, in terms of evolutionary change—as when humans began to
shed their wisdom teeth because they were no longer needed for
chewing roughage; the gradual disappearance of hair from the body,
the adjustment of the human eye to focus on fine print. Major evolutionary shifts don't
happen quickly, but when they are complete, everything is different,
and it feels as though it happened overnight. This New Year's Eve is like that—like fish frozen in a winter pond. You know they're not
dead, but they certainly look dead. Will they swim away
when the water thaws? A major leap is on the horizon, but we don't
yet know whether that leap will be backward or forward.
This restlessness of the
soul is so uncomfortable that we try to block it, or get rid of it.
We engage in behavior that gives us temporary relief but, in the long
run, does us more harm than good—things like alcohol, drugs,
promiscuity, obsessive shopping. The fact is, we simply have to wait
and watch. Wait and watch and pray and do what we can to help one
another get though this period of uncertainty.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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