August is the month to let go, to embrace the buzz and like a long exposure photograph, let everything else swirl around you while you stand still and exhale for 31 days.
There are a lot of things broken in the world right now, if you’ve not read One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad, now is still a good time to do that. Or if you’ve not had the chance to see The Settlers, a documentary by Louis Theroux. And if you just skipped over this paragraph because you’re tired and numb and just want to ignore another horrific account of what is happening in Gaza, in Palestine, in the West Bank anywhere else in the world, I want to say: I get it. I feel that, too. Nobody wants to actually believe that people can be this cruel. How easy it would be to think: it’s all fake. Or half-fake. Or at least not happening to you.
But something’s been gnawing at me for a while now.
There are a lot of things broken in the world and for the most part I’m afraid I’ve expressed my thoughts sparsely on any of it. I’ve written about Palestine before, I’ve included recommendations, I’ve written about capitalism, landlordism but most of the time I felt inhibited by fear of sounding dumb or worse repetitive.
There’s this thing about not wanting to be that person in the room who starts their sentence with: ‘As was previously mentioned…’
Although a few people have pointed this out by now, that nobody needs your nuance, people need your support.
And then of course there’s no absolute truth and only time can tell how many times you were wrong. But not saying anything, not digging down and reaching for compassion, that is always wrong.
That’s the thing that is gnawing at you.
Last month I prepared a lecture on Rebecca Solnit for the Sunday Essay Club and I was reminded that this thing that I want to do with my life, the values that I have, they are not aligned right now and that it doesn’t have to be this way. But reading how Solnit in her early 30s realised what kind of a writer she wants to be, made me realise what kind of a writer I aspire to be:
“The Nevada Test Site taught me to write because it was there that I realized there was no reason the very lyrical, tight personal essays that I'd been writing, the journalism, and art criticism — which felt like three different things — had to be separate. I needed to use all of them as techniques to describe a place that was so complex and loaded and layered. It was a magic era.”