Last Week...

context, context, context

A friend has asked for a picture tonight, and I’m happy to oblige. It’s been quite a week. by Heather Cox Richardson

Last week was a very difficult week for me personally. I am keeping the details private for now but I mention this for a reason. Everyone has a unique context. Although we live at the same time we experience life very differently. Even our understanding of the context of trusted friends is necessarily limited.

I am beginning this post with an article that impacted me at both an intellectual level and an emotional level, striking me in both my head and my heart.

Leaving Space for Grace by Jamie Wheal

And finally, Tragic Optimism. Everything’s gonna work out–just maybe not for me in this lifetime.

So in choosing a better, more accurate, more inclusive story to steer by, we might slow down to listen to other voices, like Zen grandmother ecologist Joanna Macy.

Her notion, that we are “the People of the Passage” traversing through “the Great Unraveling” feels like it acknowledges the seismic shifts of our moment, as well as our responsibility to some future yet to be born.

We may not get to the Promised Land ourselves, but we keep on walking in the conviction that our children, or their children, might.

One aspect of my context is that I view events through a metamodern lens. It is a story that has captured me. I believe that we are in a liminal time between worlds. Modernity, our civilization, is unstainable and will probably collapse. But I want to keep on walking.

I do not have any children which for me at this time is one less thing to worry about. But I want to do whatever little I can to help others make it to the Promised Land. Jamie Wheal calls for Tragic Optimism which he once called Radical Hope, and I wrote about this years ago in my (very good) essay, About Becoming Radical, posted March 5, 2022.

Another idea that resonates strongly with me, particularly now in the days shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, comes from Jamie Wheal in his article How To Find Radical Hope.

Most people are not radical and have not given up on Modernity, which sometimes leaves us People of the Passage in a lonely place.

Are Things Falling Apart? by Robert Wright

Yeats had reasons to think things were falling apart. He was writing at the end of World War I, and amid a flu epidemic that killed millions and almost killed his wife. I think today there are a lot of people who would say that they, too, have reasons to think things are falling apart.

But after that conversation I had coffee with an American resident of Doha who made me wonder whether I’d been overestimating the number of people who are having that Yeats feeling… So maybe, in sensing a widespread sense that things are spinning out of control, I had been overgeneralizing. Maybe things feel more untethered in the “western” world than elsewhere.

Part of my context is that I have a very strong Yeats feeling that things are spinning out of control.

Canada is not spinning out of control but the Alberta that I lived in for my whole adult life has disappeared, for now.

A Dark Day for Alberta: Government Set to Strip Rights from Trans Youth on Monday by Cole Bennett

According to multiple sources, the government plans to use Section 33 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to shield Bills 26, 27 and 29 from constitutional challenge.

If you are exhausted by a government that keeps spending time and political energy targeting 0.01% of the population, there are ways to push back…

Perhaps a dark day is also coming from another direction.

The Great AI Bubble by Carole Cadwalladr

Yes, it’s a bubble. And yes, it’s going to burst.

Welcome to the Great AI Bubble, a metastasized trillion dollar tech tumour so massive it’s practically visible from space.

Hang tight.

I have mixed feelings about Jack Hopkins but I do think reading his free articles are worth my time.

I agree that The Power Transfer Has Already Begun.

Every power shift begins with a tone change.

Last week the tone changed.

My Substack Notes feed captures that changed tone. It also captures a tone that is changing far too slowly. I hope to have lots more to say about this in 2026 and will share only one Note at this time.