You made a comment to a colleague the other day that one could hear more sighs than breaths in the pantry, where people escape from their desks to load up on caffeine beverages, or simply to walk it off for a moment. Yes, business is good, one supposes, if everyone’s so busy all of the time, but there’s an extra sense of exasperation in the air. No one thinks they have the necessary resources to do their work properly, or sales has contributed to the fiasco by overselling and promising the world. Expectations are high, something more appropriate perhaps in a Harry Potter world, impossible to meet, or even to provide moderate disappointment. Yet, the board of directors has offered C-level management huge incentives to cut costs further.
It all begins to form an agonizing and gyrating spectacle of increasing hysteria, of sinking deeper into impossibility. One wonders what can be done, where to go, whether there’s another job out there…
But alas, it’s happening everywhere. Every bank and software company, every startup and green grocer. Everyone is panting for breath, out of breath, or passed out from holding their breath too long.
Meanwhile Nazis are marching in the streets, we have a president who should be on anti-psychotic drugs and who is playing chicken with our lives, and the weather is flashing us signs that things are in fact the way many scientists have stated, though a large number of our leaders are too stubborn, blind or greedy to admit it.
What makes it worse is all of those positive messages out there, people selling paths to a miraculous recovery, bliss, and a wholly fulfilled life if you download their $95 special mp3’s that will teach you gratitude and mindfulness. But pooh-pooh all that. You already have everything you need. It’s your very experience that you are trying to escape that will give you back your salvation.
After experiencing, some in the trenches, others via the fallout, the utter absurdity of the first world war, a number of artists started what eventually became the loosely knit Dada moment, and subsequently Surrealism, all of which were an out and out rejection of the civilizaiton that brought about the absurdity in the first place.
One such Surrealist, a man named Antonin Artaud, went further, left the group, and decided to create what he called the Theater of Cruelty. Artaud felt that art wasn’t accomplishing its main task, which was to wake people up, that it was actually helping to create a deeper distancing and snoozing effect that kept people from a fully realized experience of reality. His theater was meant to be both jarring and disturbing to his audiences (just as aspects of our lives are to us), and to be a form of social and invidual therapy, to provide the cold-water splash to the face to help people achieve a “woke” state.
This life you have, this seeming impossibility, is your teacher. Listen to it and develop a fabulous sense of humor. It will help you survive and flourish. Walk into that pantry and see the other human beings in the room. Imagine what they are feeling. Drop the resentment you have toward your boss, the person who got the promotion you wanted, the guy in the corner office with the attitude, and most of all the story you’ve been telling yourself. Ask: what’s really happening here?