Living in existential angst. War vs comedy.
How do we exist in the day to day, grappling over the Small Things of life when there is global atrocity, war, climate crisis happening?
It has been a strange and unsettling week this week. It’s half term but I have been working some 16hr days on an additional ‘art’ project at the Studio.
The project is a fun, huge, short-term project making enormous colourful panels as a 40ft theatre backdrop for a musical storytelling bonfire night attended by 50,000 people.
And as I’m up my ladder with glooping masonry paint in hideous pinks and pale greens and orange, my ears absorb the crisis on the radio. Israel, Gaza, Hamas, European policy, Biden. Murder.
How futile!
What am I doing creating these multicoloured cartoons of cheer with all this going on?
It seems utterly ridiculous.
Last week I was messaging a DJ pal who was at the dance festival when Hamas attacked. His friend’s niece was taken as one of the hostages. He said he’s never been so pleased to be back home in the UK. I offer some space for processing and offloading - he says music is his way to process and heal the trauma.
We’re living in such a diabolical mess.
And yet life goes on.
How do we cope with the existential nightmare of living (‘a good life’) while at the same time these atrocities continue?
What can we do? How do we deal with the overwhelm?
Perhaps there is a lesson in talking with my DJ friend. Immerse, process, heal.
Find music, find art, find beauty, find an inner sanctum, find some way to be okay, and then do what we can with what we have.
It’s sometimes easy to feel off balance, what brings you back to centre?
NB I know a lot of my clients share these mixed emotions and if they come up for you too give me a call, we have ways to work round existing alongside them, not burying them but honouring them and the values they reflect in who we are.
