For the Love
It starts in chaos, but fear not. This is a love story.
If you flashed down into Asheville the first week of October this year, it would have felt like the opening scenes of some sort of dystopian movie. No power, curfews to keep people off the street at night; trees smashed into houses, buildings piled against each other, reduced to sticks and mud. There was no water, which is hard to imagine until you’ve lived without it. It was like our whole world was a child’s sand castle, just that easily swept away, and we were left living in rubble.
I wrote a few weeks ago about how strange it is to realize that nothing in the world is as safe as you thought it was, and to live through this weather event in the middle of an election with absurdly high stakes… well. It would be very easy to slide into dystopia, to say Welcome to the Hunger Games!
I mean, last week there was a Nazi rally in Times Square. We’re almost there.
But.
This is not that kind of story.
Hope In Three Acts
I’m working on a research project right now for women living with Stage IV advanced ovarian cancer, whose disease is considered incurable. Who are looking right into the eye of every fear: the end of it all. In the middle of the Asheville apocalypse, I was creating a workshop for women who are living in their apocalypse.
The workshop felt like a gift from the universe, because writing this workshop for women who have been told by medicine we cannot cure you, I thought, if I am claiming to craft a narrative that will empower these women with hope and resilience and peace, then… shouldn’t it also work for me?
Shouldn’t it also work for all of us?
What story do we tell, when the world is falling away around us?
The first act of the workshop tackles the challenge of the broken story, our fears and insecurities that drain us and cause suffering. It offers a path to write a different story, and a promise: if you change the narrative, everything changes… starting with you.
The second act of the workshop is focused on mystery: how do you flourish, when the world is so uncertain, when anything could fall apart at any moment? And we explore the beauty of tapping into a flow state, that state of mind where you find joys in the present moment, immerse yourself in something that matters, connect to the flow of life around you.
And then we come to the third act.
I’ve been grappling with that for some time now, as the workshop has gone through early stages of testing and collaborations with my amazing partners. (Whom you will get to know more!)
How does the workshop end?
Well. Writing an ending for the workshop in these past few weeks has been really interesting, and has felt like its own kind of dance with the universe. Because on the one hand, I think, how can I write a good ending right now, when I still can’t drink the tap water, when I have to be careful which neighborhoods to drive through because of the devastation, and when I have to be VERY careful about the news, lest it send me into a pit of despair?
And I thought, well, if I can’t write it for me, how can I claim to teach it to anyone else?
How can I claim to offer an inspiring, hopeful ending to others, unless I also believe it for myself?
Then I realized. I was making it too difficult. This is so simple.
And then I knew how the workshop needed to end.
Screw That. This Is A Love Story.
I thought, yeah, sure, maybe some of the things going on right now seem to be a prologue to a grim dystopian universe.
Yep, I’m getting 876 text messages every day that start with ROBYN WE’RE TERRIFIED.
Yep, I still don’t have drinkable water, and who knows when I will again.
And maybe I don’t have a terminal diagnosis, oh wait, yes I do, we all do. It’s the one thing we know about life. It’s the one thing we know about everything.
It’s all going to end.
None of us is going to live forever, and by the way, neither is any system of government. These are simple facts of biology and history. Everything in the world is temporary, if you pull back far enough.
Wait, hang on, where’s the happy ending we were promised?
It’s so simple. It’s so goddamned simple.
It’s one word.
You don’t get to choose what happens in the world. But you get to write the story. And that means you get to choose the genre.
This is a love story.
One word, and it is always within your power to make it come true.
This is a love story.
No matter what happens in the days and weeks and months ahead, that’s all you have to remember, and I’m saying this to myself more than anyone else.
No matter what happens, remember.
This is a love story.
And what do you do, in a love story?
So simple. Everyone who’s ever read a romance novel or watched one knows the answer to this.
A love story gets going when the hero — that’s you!! — makes the first move.
How To Make The First Move
Freud said a lot of weird things, but he also said some really true things, and he had a simple secret to happiness and a meaningful life.
“Work and love, love and work, that’s all there is.”
- Sigmund Freud
It’s helpful to remember that throughout human history, people have lived in horrible times and they have flourished, because nothing can take away our ability to love. And as long as we love something, and as long as we are moving towards that love, then we are in the middle of a love story.
And here’s a delightful plot twist: you can love anything at all.
You can love playing piano, or you can love a parakeet, or you can love the way the trees look at this stage of autumn, a symphony of red and gold. You can love, this year, these mountains, and the way that when you look at them from a distance they are still gloriously unspoiled, because when we pull back far enough, we can see, we will move through this moment, we will recover, everything beautiful and glorious is still there. The world is a love story.
You can love live music, especially the way it feels when the artist on stage belts out “Sweet Caroline!” and 80,000 strangers respond, “BAH BAH BAH!!!” Every song is a love story.
You can love that moment when the brownies come out of the oven and your husband says should we wait a moment to cut into them? and you say absolutely not!! and your entire body is singing with joy and anticipating before you even get that first rich luscious chocolate bite. Chocolate is a fricking love story.
You can love books, the idea that at any moment you can go anywhere in the world, just by opening a page, still the greatest act of alchemy that humanity ever discovered, in my opinion. Every book, in that sense, is a love story.
You can love writing about your mom, who has been gone for ten years, but when you conjure up her memory in your mind, her smile, her laugh, then it still feels you with joy. In her honor, you can craft a workshop for women living with ovarian cancer and in her memory you can name it HOPE IN THREE ACTS, and this is a love story too.
Do you get the point here? It doesn’t matter what you love. It doesn’t matter who you love. It only matters that you love, and that you move towards that love, and pay attention, do you know what that is?
It’s a goddamned happy ending. Happening right now.
“Everybody loves something. Even if it’s just tortillas.”
- Chogyam Trungpa
There a million ways to flourish in the world, but I can promise you that everyone who is flourishing has one thing in common: they are in the middle of a goddamn love story.
And you can too. No matter what is going on around you, you can decide, this is a love story, and you can move that way.
That’s the simplest single step to flourishing, no matter what. Just point your energy in the direction of something you love. Anything at all. Start out loving tortillas, and you will find yourself loving something more. Because every positive action creates energy for another one.
The sad truth of humanity is that fear creates more fear and hate creates more hate and tribalism creates more tribalism. We’re living in that right now. But the glorious redemption of humanity is so simple. The same thing is true the other way around.
Love creates more love.
Courage creates more courage.
Hope creates more hope.
All our lives will one day end. That’s just biology.
All systems of goverment will one day end, as well. That’s simple history.
But a love story perseveres through it all.
This is a love story.
This is your love story. And all you have to do is make the first move.
One simple move towards love.
The end.