Summer is winding down. In another week, my local school system starts the 2024-2025 year. My son will return to classes. I’ll follow a few weeks later. The last few weeks of summer are a heady combination of rest and readiness, as I cherish the last days of email silence and meeting-free schedules while also finalizing syllabi and getting my classes prepared. It’s like watching a storm system that is hundreds of miles away. You see it developing into a hurricane. You know it’s coming. And you know there’s only so much you can do to prepare for when it hits. And my, does it hit!
Anybody remember The Wiggles? My son could not get enough of that show when he was in preschool. It was my least favorite of the shows that my sister-in-law dubbed “primary color shows.” You know exactly what that means, don’t you? Television shows made for kids where everything is too bright, too loud, and too cheery. I used to try to get my son to watch anything but The Wiggles. “How about Blue’s Clues? Or maybe Thomas? I think Sesame Street is about to come on.” But he went through a phase where all he wanted to watch was The Wiggles. Of course, now he claims to have no memory of it, but lines from that show are etched into my brain, occasionally popping up like an unwanted guest. As I think about the months ahead, I can’t help but think, “Captain Feathersword! There’s a stormmmmmmmm approaching!”
The academic storm is approaching, but the outer bands of the political storm are already here. And it’s not the storm that we prepared for. Anybody living in hurricane territory can tell you that there’s no way to predict what a storm will do once it hits land. Based on the forecasters’ predictions, an entire city will have put up shutters and bought out all the grocery stores. Then suddenly the storm changes its direction and an entirely different population is at risk. And they don’t have the same time to prepare. That’s the impact of last weekend’s Democratic presto-chango. It’s bad enough that campaign season never seems to end anymore (we can count on both parties sending donation requests within a week after the election). But over the past eight years, all the rules and traditions have been out the window. Granted, there’s a lot that needs to be out the window. But constant change and turmoil is crazy-making.
In a span of weeks, we’ve experienced an attempted assassination of one presidential candidate and the dropout of another. In one week, some of us have celebrated the nomination of Kamala Harris while lamenting the murder of Sonya Massey. And oh yeah, go Team USA?! It’s too much. The highs and the lows come all at once. Sometimes I can’t tell what’s high and what’s low.
For years, I prepared for the approaching storm of the academic year by taking a social media and email break during July. Sometimes it’d be for the entire month, sometimes for just two weeks. For much of the past five years, it seems like I’ve been going through some major life change that required me to be accessible during July, whether it was a new job or a book launch. Not to mention that during cancer treatment and the COVID pandemic, social media was my only safe social outlet. But being plugged in was taking its toll on both my wellness and my creative productivity.
For the entire month of July, I have been restricting my use of electronics, with the exception of writing. I’ve restarted using the Freedom app to block my access to social media, news, and gaming sites (that means you, Wordle) for all but a one-hour block of time. One hour is all the time I’m allowing myself to discover what horrible thing has happened in the world and what everybody’s mad about today. Most days I don’t even use that one hour. I get caught up in other things – resting, reading, meditating, doing yoga, going to the gym, visiting art galleries, Legos, watching Supacell and The Acolyte – and by the time I remember, my one hour opportunity has passed. And most of the time, I don’t miss it at all.
This isn’t natural, this world we’ve created, the world where we have information coming at us all the time, where we are reachable at all times even by strangers, where we are always taking in crisis and trauma from around the globe, where we are often thinking more about the opinions and experiences of people out there than we are about our right-here needs and realities. Whether it’s 24-hour news stations or Meta, this is not how we are meant to live. I used to think it was, that being a real justice advocate meant knowing what was happening in the world and being ready to speak to it. But if there’s anything I’ve learned about storms, it’s that they will always be there; we don’t have to look at them to prepare for them, to protect ourselves and others from them, or to clean up their damage.
When I started this fast, I looked forward to ending it on July 31. But now I’m not so sure that I will. I’m tired of storm-chasing. I’m going to look for the rainbow, even if I have to paint it myself.
Thank you for your writing Dr Chanequa. I find words of truth for me in every post and this one line resonated for me today “this isn’t natural this world we’ve created”
Your writing is reminding me to come home to me and rest there a while.
You are so right. We have to protect our peace.