We all matter: Teju Cole and Margaret Mead

Excerpted from Teju Cole interview with OnBeing:

“There’s a beautiful Inuit word “qarrtsiluni.” It means, “sitting together in the dark, waiting for something to happen.” I’m happy to have that be my new bio." - Teju Cole

I am beginning to realize we are living in a new world. The changes are beyond us right now, today, what we can recognize. I am recognizing  though a deep need for quiet, for contemplation, for listening. I am embracing Teju Cole's insight that we all need a great deal of help. That we are all sitting together in the dark. Later in his interview, he says that the dark is the unknown, and in this way, it is also hope. I wanted to return to Solnit's book Hope in the Dark after I heard him say that, to find intersections with this idea of hope versus optimism, which he was not proposing.

Cole continues, "One thing I do know for sure is that we all need a great deal of help. And a lot of the help that we need is in language, is in the language that has been boiled down to a quintessence so that it’s potent and effective. I continue to find a lot of that language in religious and spiritual traditions, as well as in literature and poetry — in Homer — without centering it on statements of belief, but centering it on experiences of insight or consolation.

Yeah, I think we all carry our secret debts with us, the things that we owe and we can’t quite pay back." - Teju Cole

Margaret Mead has said that a new civilization can be measured by the signs of caring for others, that the first sign of civilization in an ancient culture was a femur (thighbone) that had been broken and then healed. Mead explained that in the animal kingdom, if you break your leg, you die. You cannot run from danger, get to the river for a drink or hunt for food. You are meat for prowling beasts. No animal survives a broken leg long enough for the bone to heal.

 

 
"A broken femur that has healed is evidence that someone has taken time to stay with the one who fell, has bound up the wound, has carried the person to safety and has tended the person through recovery. Helping someone else through difficulty is where civilization starts," Mead said.

I ask myself, What are my secret debts, the things I owe, that I can't quite pay back? What is it that matters right now for me, us? People matter, all of us matter, all 100% of us. Our connections with each other, our compassion for each other.