Allegiance to Gratitude is the title of a chapter in the widely discussed book by Robin Wall Kimmerer Braiding Sweetgrass- Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. In that chapter, Kimmerer, a mother, botanist, professor of Environmental Biology at SYNU and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation introduces the Thanksgiving Address used by the Haudenosaunee Confederacy,
The first thing that hits you is the air…., the air is hot, heavy and depending on the day, clogged with particulate pollution. Your eyes often water. Your cough never disappears… You often wear a mask to protect yourself from air pollution. You can no longer simply walk out of your front door and breathe fresh air: there might not be any. Instead, before opening doors or windows in the morning, you check your phone to see what the air quality may be… When storms and heat waves overlap and cluster, the air pollution and intensified surface ozone levels can make it dangerous to go outside…even indoors the air can taste slightly acidic, sometimes making you feel nauseated.
If you are like most of us under COVID19, you may have been waiting for life to return to normal: going back to the office, visiting clients across the world, taking kids to school in the morning, shopping without masks as often as you choose to, having friends over for a meal in the dining room, going to an exercise class, attending a sports event or a conference in person, hugging friends and many more activities currently out of reach or with limitations. But, you now have been waiting for months, and for those of us who live in the United States, it looks like we will have a few more months of waiting.
Some experience their entry points into midlife as maximally disturbing, with overwhelming levels of stress and fear. They cannot believe this is happening to them: they feel incredulous. Sometimes they notice impaired judgment, confusion, and agitation [… ]. Not knowing what the midlife passage is about, most of us redouble our efforts to get back on track, resume our lives, move past the obstacle at hand, and do something -anything- to return to the predictability, control, and pleasures of normal life. Many of us resist the invitation to step away from our familiar lives because we don’t appreciate that the challenges we are facing are a call to transform. Instead we search for ways to overcome each challenge as we have in the past so we can resume traveling on a familiar track at familiar speeds. But the midlife passage will not be dismissed. We do not overcome it; it overcomes us.
