We Were *Not* Made For These Times: But We Must Let These Times Make Us

I am a Clarissa Pinkola Estes devotee, but at this point I must disagree with her beautifully written, inspiringly imaged and metaphored essay We Were Made For these Times.

It is an elegant essay, and I have watched people devour it in hopes that it would ease and inspire them as they attempt to navigate the world at this particular time – a world gone mad, surely. Surely the human world has gone mad.

Hannah Grapp

To imagine we are made for these times is to imagine that that which dreamed the world into being, including us, imagined these times and dreamt the very antidote in its crafty, one-step-ahead way that it seems to have facilitated some of the most extraordinary nearly unimaginable beauty, collaboration and innovation in the wild world. But at this point, neither do I believe this is true nor do I believe it is anything but a kind of spiritual bypass to imagine that we were made for these times.

Quite literally, our nervous systems were not made for these times. The intricate network of nerves and synapses is a measurable physiological phenomenon and a miracle of Nature simultaneously, as it weaves to connect all aspects, corporeal and spiritual, of our human experience. It interacts with our senses and perceptions to form our experience of the nature of the world and our value and belonging to it. And yet, as mighty as it is, it has not evolved at nearly the speed with which our species is devolving. If we evolved as quickly as bacteria the story would be different. But we don’t. It takes hundreds if not thousands of years for us to iterate in ways a simple bacteria does in less than 24 hours. Our triune autonomic nervous system was most assuredly not made for these times. 

We were not made to witness the destruction of our planet, the willful obliteration of our children’s future, nor the systematic gutting of their psyches and souls in the blue glow of things as ignoble as Tik Tok and Snap Chat. We were not made for the one-step-ahead of us (at least) opportunism of the pharmaceutical industries or the technology lords who see a dollar sign on each precious forehead of our offspring.

We were not made to simply read the headlines, let alone live the nightmares, that remind us that bowling is no longer a safe past time, nor is going to a movie, nor is sitting in your car at a stop light, nor walking to school, nor sitting in your home, nor sleeping in your home. As I write this, multiple emergency vehicles scream down the street next to mine. It is 7:38am on a Saturday morning in bucolic and inordinately wealthy Boulder, Colorado. 

To imagine we were made for these times asks of us that we are not brought to our knees, made inconsolable, that we do not find ourselves terrified to get out of our cars while we sit in the parking lot of the local grocery store. To be told we are made for these times is to ask of us that we quiet the very intelligent very important voice inside us that screams, I am not made for these times!! 

No, my dears, we were not made for these times. But we must let these times make us.

We must let these times call us up and out into versions of ourselves that have not yet been seen on Earth. We must be savvy and cunning. We must make ourselves inhospitable to the strategic assaults to our spirit and our courage, while making ourselves eminently findable by the deep Dream of The World. We must allow ourselves to be made in just such a way that we become brave and ingenious collaborators with the Dream in ways we could not have imagined. We must learn to serve in these times, not from a place of desperation or saving but from a place of love, deep imagination and fertile rage. 

We must pull off a kind of willed evolution of spirit and magick.

We must find a way to hold all that is happening right now without needing to step back from each new headline, each new horror or loss, each new low of humanity. We must find a way to witness the unfathomable and willful destruction, the ignorance and ingratitude, without being take down by it. But we must continue to grieve it, to wail for and to honor each loss, even as we do not stop serving. We must remember, even as we are not balking, that what is happening is not okay. What is happening to the Earth, to our children, to our elders, the everyday people, the poor and un-guarded, the helpless is NOT okay. But, it is most assuredly happening and it is likely it will continue to happen. And so, we must learn to stand in two places at once. No, it is not okay. We do not consent. Not in our name. And we must carry on serving, and grieving, and being shaped by these times, and learning to show up even more, hospicing what must die (and fast) and midwifing what must be seeded for whatever is to come. We must learn to navigate and prevail in these times.

Fernando Gomez Cortes

We must learn to say, each in our way, beyond the fertile rage and the grief, Ah yes, it all makes sense. This is what it looks like when a world of this magnitude and complexity, a world of this level of lostness, unravels. And this too, and now this…And it is not okay…And it is happening, and it makes sense…

Yet we cannot do this if we allow ourselves to be made numb by these times or equally, if we allow ourselves to be endlessly tossed around in their frothy waters, each new day bringing a new assault to our overwhelmed naive spirit. What is happening makes sense. It is not okay, and it makes sense…

Seek out your kin, both the humans and more-than, the ones who are similarly inspired to be fashioned by these unfathomable times. Know that you’re not alone, but also, make sure you’re in good company. Create community of like-minded warriors who are strategically allowing themselves to be shaped and honed for the particular kind of warriorship that is required right now. Let go of the naiveté that is clinging desperately to an erroneous view of human nature. Make no mistake, we are at war. We may not be made for these times, but these times can make us, if we let them. 

And we must.