Apathy Is The Shadow Of Engagement

Apathy is a relational label that most believe reside solely in individual people, often considered as some kind of disease to be dealt with. The prescription often immediately presented is that of physical action. Get the person interested in an activity and the apathy will go away. The insidiousness of apathy, why it resides as a shadow with engagement, is how easy it is to mistake mere movement with engagement. Activity can blind a person to reality by mistaking physical movement for awareness. 



The myth to be abolished is precisely that activity equals deliberate engagement. Quantity of movement, no matter how frenzied, does not in itself signify a conscious intentional connection between the individual and the community or ideology.  This ease of mimicry leads to the uncomfortable acknowledgment that all the family vacations, all the phone calls one makes for a political party, the house parties one throws for church groups and even the amount of sex one has with spouse or significant other, is all for naught if the action is done without an intentional engagement with those involved.



If we but move we will be free, or as one popular tagline declares: “just do it.” No declaration is made as to just what “it” is, but assurance is pronounced that engaging in “it” will alleviate the banality or apathetic feeling. There is a salvation message here, one that speaks to action for the sake of action bringing new life. Yet with every rally, every weekend retreat, we feel a growing sense of our own powerlessness and a disconnection with our fellow human beings. Without deliberation, without consciously placing the metaphorical self into the stream of life's events to see the relation that one has with every experience, action is simply a haphazard attempt to fill a biological need, a gut reaction without meaning. 



Thomas Moore, in Care of the Soul, notes: “Life lived soulfully is not without its moments of darkness and periods of foolishness. Dropping the salvational fantasy frees us up to the possibility of self-knowledge and self-acceptance, which are the very foundation of soul.” 



Mere action leads to apathy because we are so busy attempting to be free from our natural reality, we run away from it rather than engage and stride along with it. Imagination is the means by which we bridge the content of our lives with the substance of our hopes and dreams. Consciously deliberate, or engaged, imagination looks at our inability to fly and creates airplanes, looks upon relational separation birthed by religious fundamentalism and declares instead that we are one with the universe, ponders disease and comes up with research to cure it and looks upon a world continuing towards destruction and offers new forms of energy, conservation and the idea of living in balance.



None of these engagements require running away from reality, none of them hope for a salvation that is always just beyond our grasp. Each and every one of them, big and small, from the airplane to helping a stranger with getting food, never once lack acknowledgment with our physical limitations. Seeing limit, each of these engagements creates a new path to address, casting aside ego for the ever-expanding potential residing in the infinitely creative manifestation that is the universe. 



We move beyond apathy not with mere action, but with every conscious acknowledgement of the lives we live and the nature with which we live it. The fullness of our humanity comes first, the light and the dark, the exquisite and the foolish, held in the conscious bowl created by our engaged imagination. When we act, doing so from a solid foundation results in seeing we never needed any saving to begin with.







© David Teachout