IT'S GOING TO BE A CLIFFHANGER

It’s been over three months since I’ve sent out a Museletter. It's not that I haven't been musing....

I have half-finished drafts of three separate Museletters on my computer. I’m not sure what’s made it so difficult to get one out this go-round. I was finishing up work on "The Hunt" (which is looking like it'll be released on Amazon Prime in February, super exciting) but I've managed to get these out during busy times in the past, so who knows. 

Whatever the case, here we are.

In 2005 I was on a meditation retreat where a woman asked our teacher if he thought humanity was going to survive the myriad crises that were bearing down upon us. His answer haunted me then and has returned of late with a new kind of urgency: "Yes," he said. "But it's going to be a cliffhanger."
 

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I was devastated by the rain forest fires raging in Brazil. It felt like watching the Library at Alexandria or the world’s largest pharmacy burn (One third of all FDA-approved medications are plant-based. There are cures and remedies in the rainforest that have yet to be discovered.) But I was also supremely heartened by the recent global climate crisis protests. Why, I wonder, has it taken a terrified but steely Swedish teenager to move the needle on the climate crisis? And why does it seem that we're not yet nearly alarmed enough?

While the event – or confluence of events – might be unique to us and our time, the feelings underneath it are not. Every generation, it seems, stares into the abyss in their own ways. The Cold War was terrifying for earlier generations as the fear of nuclear annihilation hovered over and beneath everything. I’m sure the Crusades were no picnic (certainly not for Jews or Muslims.) There have been few respites from apocalyptic fears throughout human history. It seems built into the whole deal of simply being here. And maybe it’s just our individual fear of death blossoming into some kind of collective nightmare. 

Despair and grief are useful, appropriate, and necessary responses to our converging crises. How could we not be frightened, rattled, and enraged? Our heavy hearts are evidence of our humanity. We feel the sting of the threat because we love what we might lose. But if despair is allowed to linger too long it takes over and curdles into cynicism. And that is unacceptable because it paralyzes us. 

So what are we to do?

When I was in drama school at NYU, Zelda Fichandler, the chair and grand dame of the graduate acting program, taught a class to first years called “The Actor’s Space.” One of the exercises she had us do was called “As if,” which she insisted was the key phrase for the actor: Can we act as if something is true? This was our holy task, after all. To imagine and empathize. So Zelda had us circle up and asked us to quickly dream up as many different possible scenarios as we could. When an idea would occur to someone they were to hop into the center of the circle, state the “as if” and kind of try it out, while repeating the phrase — a kind of lightning-quick browsing for various dramatic scenarios: 
 
— “As if I’m scared of the dark.” 
— “As if I’m the most confident human who ever existed.” 
— “As if I suspect my husband of infidelity.” 
— “As if I hate trick-or-treaters.” 
— “As if I’m the undisputed ruler of most of the Western Hemisphere.” 
 
The whole point was to let our imaginations wander, near to and far from our own experiences, to get in the habit of stepping into shoes that were not our own.

The exercise was alternately thrilling and cringe-inducing (which could also pretty much describe my whole first year of drama school.) I’ve been thinking about the class and that exercise a lot lately. In these hyper-partisan, tribalized times, “As if” seems to me a particularly useful and potent phrase. Would that we could all take a moment to ask ourselves: What would it be like to think differently than I think, to have been raised differently than the way I was raised, to have more money or less money, to have endured more suffering or less suffering, to have more opportunity or less opportunity? 
 
I think our spiritual and psychological growth in life is marked — in some measure — by how deeply we can feel into other people’s pain, to understand that no one suffers in isolation. We’re much louder creatures than we realize, our behavior and states-of-mind far more contagious than we can sense. It seems a cliché but it's true: We are profoundly connected. 
 
Training to be an actor kept, and continues to keep, my muscles of empathy and imagination limber. It made my life much bigger by insisting I continually update and enlarge my circle of concern. But not everyone receives this kind of training (even though they really should and it shouldn’t be confined to drama schools.) Absent any self-critique and self-reflection, our own experiences and points-of-view remain primary and it proves difficult for many of us to care much for those outside our immediate circles.

I’ve kind of wandered off from where I intended to head so let me reroute us back to climate change. The U.N. and the U.S. both recently issued climate reports that were alarming, to say the least. The current refugee crisis, which is already taxing many countries, is nothing compared to what might be on the horizon. Water wars and energy shortages straight out of cinematic dystopias. Large swaths of densely populated lands becoming uninhabitable. Scientists — the least excitable people on the planet — are officially freaking out. Even a constitutional optimist like myself must admit: Things are looking bleak.
 
I get the resistance to really sitting with all of this. Climate change is a first-rate bummer and thus incredibly hard to keep at the front of one’s consciousness. Much like death, it’s a fact that we kind of have to submerge to keep going. I’m not suggesting I’m braver than most in looking at this stuff. I don’t want to die, nor do I want to live through some kind of post-apocalyptic warming earth scenario. I’d much prefer to bury my head in the sand and just blithely hope/assume an alliance of visionary climatologists and politicians of good conscience will figure something out before the credits roll.

There has long been — unsurprisingly and unconscionably — deep political and entrepreneurial opposition to doing a single thing about global warming, or even admitting the basic fact of it, insisting the whole thing is a politically-motivated fiction. (The idea that 97 percent of scientists have some sort of left-leaning political agenda is just completely delusional.) I’m not sure what is motivating these climate change-deniers beyond profit margins and good lord that’s depressing. A New Yorker cartoon - as it often does - sums it up perfectly:

All the studies about why people aren’t more fired up and alarmed about the climate crisis point to the fact that it’s both kind of too large for us to wrap our heads around and it doesn’t seem yet to have affected much of our daily lives (assuming of course your home is out of the way of wildfires and hurricanes.) Rattling off the many impending disasters a failure to combat climate change will wreak seems to work about as well as telling a smoker the dangers of cigarettes. Smokers know the dangers, they do it anyway. That’s essentially what an addiction is: an inability to cease life-threatening behavior. And that’s what we’re dealing with on a collective level with climate change: Addictions to plastic, to oil, to meat, to comfort, to basically our entire way of life. 
 
But it seems one of the biggest hurdles is this notion that by the time the worst of it arrives we’ll all be long gone. It won’t be our mess to clean up, if clean-up is even possible at that point. An odious passing of the buck, to be sure (“Hey, we ruined the planet for you, good luck!”). For all our vaunted talk of evolution, humans rarely change until we have to change. So that’s where we are today: Very few of us are willing to budge because it appears our daily lives can continue unperturbed. This puts us in a terrible predicament: This is an all-hands-on-deck moment if ever there was one, but for a variety of very complicated psychological reasons, it’s supremely hard to get people alarmed enough.
 
So here’s the thought experiment: I’m going to ask you to act as if reincarnation is a fact. That we don’t end when we die. We shed these bodies and we get another one. And then we return. Life is a circle not a straight line. Just hold that as a truth for one moment. You can drop it as quickly as you picked it up. 
 
Why am I asking you to consider this? I have no theological agenda here. I’m neither Hindu nor Buddhist. I just keep thinking that this idea that we won’t be around for the worst of the climate crisis might be totally wrong. What if we will be here? Not in heaven with all those who looked and prayed like us — or in hell with those who sinned and transgressed like us — but rather back on the very earth we despoiled? Could this perhaps shift people’s thinking on this issue? What if this is not something that our children and grandchildren will bear the brunt of? What if it’s us? What if we will be our grandchildren or great-grandchildren? That we will be born onto a roiling, hot, resource-scarce, war-ridden planet? (Maybe that’s actually what ‘hell’ is…) What then? Does it change our approach? Does the whole issue suddenly feel more urgent? 
 
This feels like a useful “As if” to me because it obliterates any notion of kicking the can down the road. We will quite literally reap the world we have sown. Now even if you don’t believe this, on the off chance this is how it works, doesn’t that stir something in you? Make you want to tread upon the earth with a touch more delicacy? Take greater care of thought, word, and deed? Want to participate more actively in the healing of our ailing planet? 

Confronting the environmental crisis is at once scientific, political, and spiritual. Might the ancient help us with the modern, the sacred inform the secular? Could we find it in ourselves to be the heroes of our own story? Can we act as if we will return here? As if our every action in this lifetime is of deep and lasting consequence? As if the earth is not just our current home but our future one as well?

I had such a great time talking to Joseph Arthur on his podcast "Come To Where I'm From." And I loved this soulful, musical conversation between my friends Rob Bell and Kerenza Peacock on Rob's podcast. 

My favorite comedian Gary Gulman has a special on HBO premiering October 5 called "The Great Depresh." I was at the taping, it's extraordinary. Do not miss it. How Comedian Gary Gulman Overcame Depression to Make the Funniest Stand-Up Special of the Year.
 
I've been a huge fan of The Indigo Girls ever since I saw the video for "Closer To Fine" on VH1 in the late 80's. Their talk with Krista Tippett on On Being is such a treat.
 
Loved this profile of Brad Pitt in The New York Times: The Planets, The Stars, & Brad Pitt and this one on Tegan & Sara: Nine Albums Later, Tegan and Sara Are Finally Ready to Discuss High School. 

My dear friend Judith Light got a Star on The Hollywood Walk of Fame. She's truly one of the greats and this interview with her is terrific: I Was Never Really The Ingénue.

Sister Helen Prejean: Boot Camp For Nuns

The Radical Portraits of Amy Sherald
 
A lovely elegy for Toni Morrison by Roxane Gay.

A wildly talented songwriter named David Berman died on August 7. He was the lead singer and songwriter for a band called Silver Jews and very shortly before his death he released a spectacular album called Purple Mountains. I suspect Berman will become one of those people who achieve a kind of Nick Drake-esque posthumous fame. His music is very special. Three beautiful pieces on him: David Berman Struggled to Feel the Joy He Brought Us, Rob Sheffield's Remembering David Berman's Wild Kindness, and Sarah Larson's David Berman Made Us Feel Less Alone. 

This is the most charming & delightful thing I've seen on-line in a long time: Brian Cox teaching Shakespeare to a toddler. 
 
And finally, this is wonderful: Rainbows, Frogs, Dogs, & 'The Muppet Movie' Soundtrack at 40.

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As always, if you're enjoying these please spread the word (people can sign up here) And if you're new to these check out past Museletters. JR