Staying with the Trouble

We—all of us on Terra—live in disturbing times, mixed-up times, troubling and turbid times. The task is to become capable, with each other in all of our bumptious kinds, of response. […] The task is to make kin in lines of inventive connection as a practice of learning to live and die well with each other in a thick present. Our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places. In urgent times, many of us are tempted to address trouble in terms of making an imagined future safe, of stopping something from happening that looms in the future, of clearing away the present and the past in order to make futures for coming generations. Staying with the trouble does not require such a relationship to times called the future. In fact, staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as moral critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings.”  ¹

practices of staying with the trouble, nurturing connection and care in apocalyptic times.²

We don’t need to fix the pain of others, nor explain it away, in order to attend to it. We simply need to hold space for it, allowing for the experiences of others to stir our hearts and remind us of what it means to be in authentic communion with others.²

The perilousness of our present moment—environmental, political, social, and otherwise—provides us with the opportunity to put our deepest values into action.²

Footnotes

1. Haraway 2016, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Cthulucene, p. 1 ↩

2. https://erikjampa.substack.com/p/staying-with-the-trouble-in-burning ↩ ↩² ↩³