We know too much

plus, a gathering (online) to rest it down

In London, it has been raining for so long.
My skin is perpetually damp with residual rain.
I walked home, stuffing my hair into the nape of my raincoat.
Umbrella renting space under my chin, while I searched for my keys.
A boy walked past yanking a suitcase that reached the height of his intestines.
Leaves, mud, chewing gum and fried chicken skins embedded in the wheels.
The travelling archive of a city that we carry home with us.
I saw someone watching him. Maybe his mum. An aunt. A caregiver. Someone.
Someone who loves him.
Her eyes told me so.

She waited until he crossed the road, watched him walk away.
She didn’t move. Didn’t break her gaze.
She waited. She watched. She waved.

I wanted to know more.
Where is he going?
Why do I feel emotional?
Is he going on an adventure?
She’s going to miss him.
I can feel her missing him.

But, I didn’t need to know.
I didn’t need more.
It was enough to be curious.
This moment was enough.

I didn’t need to see a vlog of his train journey.
Or see a documentary about where he was going.
I didn’t need to know more than what I knew.
I was complete.

---

I’ve been sitting with this idea of knowing too much. Notes app peppered with thoughts and questions. I watched a video of Gabriel Basso on The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon. I’ve watched it several times. Fallon asked why Basso recently deleted his Instagram, to which he shared a story about scrolling until he saw a photo of the view from the top of Mount Everest. After the natural reaction of witnessing the beauty, he went on to say, “wait, what, why do I now know what that looks like?”

The line that stayed with me was Basso saying, “It bothered me that I had that image in my head now, without any effort to earn that visual.”

Damn.

The paradox of having access to witnessing such beauty that we would never ordinarily see on devices so small, yet open us up to what is inconceivably big. For all of its power, do we know too much? Were we ever supposed to hold such volume?

---

We’re surrounded by information and statistics. Consuming content at Concorde speed. Reading and responding. Listening and reacting. Feverish due to overwhelm that causes us to either numb-out or burn-out. We see things that our brains were never equipped to see. We know what lands we will never walk on look like. We see inside the soil. Watch nature documentaries of space-on-Earth, aka the ocean and get lost in its depths. I saw a video of human breastmilk under a microscope the other day.

It’s spectacular. It’s terrifying.
It’s a lot.

Modern life is the credits at the end of a film moving so fast we can barely stop to read them, yet they keep playing over and over again. We can’t give each of those precious names on screen the time they deserve as it goes so quickly. We don’t get to honour their craft, their work, their artistry. There’s no time. The next name speeds past our retinas. But, we try. We really try. Then, the next film plays, more credits, less time. On repeat.

3 million Epstein files.
Death toll in Gaza: 70,000.

We are drowning in numbers so incomprehensible to our psyche. How can we even honour the victim-survivors in all these digital files with blacked-out redactions when there’s more than any one human can physically go through? How can we grieve for so many lives lost when rich souls are reduced to a number?

How can we do anything when we’re so overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of everything? It’s by design. It is by design.

---

Despite it all, I am grateful to be alive during this time. As an endlessly curious, meaning-maker I do indeed want to see what breastmilk looks like under a microscope. I want to read testimonies from people who have lived through such atrocities and risk their lives and freedom to share their stories with us. I want to know. I want to engage in these times. I am here, inside them, living in it, even when it fractures my heart and gnaws at my insides.

This isn’t about knowing less or consuming more. There’s no advice or fix. This isn’t a “how to stay sane” guide. The truth is, what you need to do in order to continue, will be different to what I need. Your capacity is different to mine. All I know, is that we need more space to acknowledge and honour the weight of knowing so much and the impact of how it makes us feel.

We need more recognition for what it means to be human during these times, without any solutions, advice or answers. Without knowing what to do with it all. Just the acknowledgment of how it feels to be in it. How it feels to not know what to do with knowing too much.

I don’t want any more polarity. I don’t want binary all-or-nothing, “do this, wait don’t do that” answers. Look where that has gotten us. I want somewhere in-between, here, in the uncertainty and grey of it all. I want to feel without expectation, I want to cry without being prompted to stop, I want to laugh and dance without shame or guilt. I want to exist without knowing anything beyond this moment of existence.

Photo taken at Wes Anderson, Design Museum

---

We compare life to our ancestors, so it’s easy to say that our ancestors didn’t have access to all of this information. That we should go back to those times. Simplify. Unplug. Disengage. They knew what was happening in their own world, but not the world-at-large.

I believe in ancestral wisdom, but we are not our ancestors. When we crave the old times and have this misguided “eat like they did” sort of nostalgia, we are dismissing what is here. Sure, we can eat like cavemen, but let’s not forget that they didn’t have shiny supermarkets and advertising campaigns that make you want to lick the screen.

It’s not the same world. We have what we have, so how do we respond to what we have? Learning but not replicating.

For me, it comes down to capacity. I’m exploring how I centre what is in my locality when I’m not feeling resourced enough to know more. The locality of my own mind, heart, body and spirit. The people local to me, many of whom I yearn to know deeper. The animals and birds I see each day. The community I can touch and access.

From that space of enrichment, I can know more, see more, understand more. I can advocate for lives that will never collide with mine. I can watch videos of pangolins and pink grasshoppers knowing that I will probably never encounter one in my life. And mostly, knowing it isn’t a race to fill up one’s mind.

---

In the season of not knowing or needing to know what to do with it all, but to just acknowledge what is here and rest down what is here; I’m hosting an online gathering…

THE DROP OFF
A gathering for relentless times

Because we’re not designed to carry all of this weight without finding moments to rest it somewhere, maybe count the passing pigeons, have one of those “wait, what time is it?” naps, or chuckle with someone. Before we pick it up again. Those moments matter. They’re vital. They allow us to continue.

The Drop Off is a 90 minute online gathering for staying here and staying human, during times that ask a lot of us. When we don’t know what to do, we can notice how the world is sitting in us. We can sit together and write. We can sit together and rest.
We can sit together and remember the juicy aliveness that’s proof of our humanness.

There’ll be some gentle prompts and guidance, we’ll write, we’ll reflect, we’ll witness each other and there’ll be a nervous-system supporting practice. For those who are new to my work you can check out my experience here.

It’s on Wednesday 25th February, 7:00-8:30pm (UK time), on Zoom, you can find out how to join us here.

Let’s gather.