This Game is Not Reality

Post-election thoughts: take your eyes off the screen

I had the honor of being invited to lead an event the evening that election returns came in at a new social club/salon in NYC called the CX. Instead of doing a discussion about the electoral college or party politics, I decided to conduct something more, empathic. These were mostly artists, activists, and counterculture folks who — like me — tend to absorb a whole lot more from the environment than may be healthy. It’s a bit like we are “tripping” all the time, with our nervous systems exposed to whatever may be happening.

So I chose to use a modified version of a Quaker meeting as our format. We just sat together, and after a bit of framing by me, people stood up one at a time to share their hopes, fears, and experiences, and then sat back down again. Everyone processed whatever had been said, maybe “metabolized” the stress or anxiety together, and then someone else would stand and share.

We did that for about 90 minutes, so by the time the election returns starting coming in, we were in a different state. I had actually begun things by reciting part of a Jewish prayer/poem called the Unetaneh Tokef (which I’ve been thinking about a lot lately). It comes off like a pretty severe prayer at first. It’s the one Jews read on “high holidays,” which essentially says that “on Rosh Hashanah it is…