I’ve been working my way through what I call my aspirational bookshelf, meaning I aspire to be the type of person who might one day want to read the books on it. Well, quarantine breeds self-improvement, as they say, and so I’ve knocked a few out and expect to be infinitely more interesting by August.
This week I’ve been on The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell, which no, I’ve never read before; and no, you can’t take my English license away for that because I just renewed for ten more years, FOOLS. You know what? I’ve never read Anna Karenina, either. How bout them apples? Ho ho! And I’ve never seen Good Will Hunting either, so I only kind of understand that reference! COME AT ME.
Anyway, Campbell keeps popping up in spirituality books I’ve been reading, so I figured there was more to him than just archetypal criticism of Pixar movies, and The Power of Myth doesn’t disappoint. Dude is fascinating. In particular, his description of a way of living he calls the “wasteland” really turned me into the hmm emoji for a couple of days.
Here’s Campbell’s definition, emphasis mine: “…a wasteland, a land where people were living inauthentic lives… In a wasteland, people are fulfilling purposes that are not properly theirs but have been put upon them as inescapable laws. This is a killer” (121).
Hmm indeed. KILLER indeed! The idea that I’ve been doing a bunch of stuff I never signed up for has been flapping around my mental rafters for a while. Glennon Doyle says all this best. Why DO I keep asking other people what I should do? Why DO I keep following rules I think suck? But this week, as so many people are diving over couches to get back to pre-COVID life, Campbell’s words seemed like an invitation to consider how much of that life was ever even properly mine.
I was doing some mighty wasteland-ish things before quarantine, to be sure. The list is long, but here’s the summary: my kids and I were overscheduled, stressed, and exhausted ALL of the time, and I don’t remember ordering any of that.
Now, personal responsibility and such—when life goes back to “normal,” I am fully able to NOT do some of the stressful things we were doing. Some others, though, would require cultural surgery to remove. We’ve slid into a tacit agreement that a frenetic pace of life is the price of social inclusion, or perhaps the promise of upward mobility (or maybe just clinging to the middle class by your fingernails): Every adult will work 40 hours per week, minimum, every child will spend comparable hours in a school or child care facility, and what waking time remains will be spent driving back and forth to places.
Or, to borrow from Eli Cash again: Everyone knows you and your kids had to be out of your house performing various tasks and duties from 7:00 AM to 5:00 PM every day, but what this blog presupposes is… Maybe we didn’t?
We would need to change, hmmm…*counts fingers*…seventeen bajillion major and complex things about the way American society is structured in order to entertain that idea, including healthcare, public education, and childcare, for starters. But hey, it’s not every day we have a pandemic! (A century. It’s every century.) With this one, we seem to have an opportunity both individually and collectively to consider how much of our lives we ordered and what might be worth sending back to the kitchen. What of your pre-COVID life was properly yours, as Joseph Campbell put it? If the answer is “not much,” can you choose to send some of it back? If you can’t send it back, can you vote for a new chef, or for someone who might write legislation to remodel the whole kitchen?
My tolerance level for being overworked and overstressed has very recently dropped to zero, and I have no interest in building it back up. I am but one opinionated woman, but if enough of us opt out of the hustle, and perhaps even announce it to our twelve regular blog readers or 75 Facebook friends or whatever spheres of influence we possess, society just might start to smell what we’re cooking.
It’s oatmeal scotchies, by the way. Freedom from stifling cultural expectations smells like oatmeal scotchies, so that’s what we’re cooking.
