What If This Were Enough?: Essays

by Heather Havrilesky

Our bewildered state doesn’t just injure us individually; it impedes our ability to work together for a better world. We can’t stand for justice and effect change until we’ve learned to push away empty temptations, shiny dead ends, and trivial distractions. As long as we’re perpetually assaulted by a barrage of news and tweets and texts, as long as commercial messages and smooth brands and profit-minded discourse are our only relief from our insecure realities, we’ll never develop the ability to live in the present moment. We have to cultivate compassion for ourselves and each other. We have to connect with each other in genuine and meaningful ways. But we also have to relearn how to breathe in the late summer air and feel the sunshine, to admire the swelling pink clouds and shut out the hiss of truck brakes, to sit on the ground and look up at the trees without looking ahead to what we’ll post on Facebook about it. You can have your eclipse and I will have mine. You can call yours a miracle and I will call mine a certain slant of light, like the one Emily Dickinson described: heavenly and oppressive and fleeting.