I was a senior in high school when the planes hit the Twin Towers. I remember my teacher who was also a football coach that normally walked in with jokes, now had tears in his eyes. I held onto my desk, as he began to speak. His voice trembled as he told us what had just happened. Then a voice came through the intercom as the Vice Principle announced all after school activities were canceled. I was directing a play at that time and I remember being upset to lose the day of rehearsal. I didn’t really understand what was going on until I got home and sat in front of the T.V. as most of country did that day.

A feeling washed over me for the very first time. A feeling I’d come to know very well over the next 25 years. A feeling like standing between worlds – the one we know or knew and the one arriving. It’s very still in the foreground of the feeling, but there is a churning, a swirling in the background. There is an undeniable helplessness in the feeling, a powerful reminder that some things are far beyond my control.

This is not an piece about politics. This is a piece about my experience making a life in a troubled world, which has felt nearly all my adult life like trying to build a house in a windstorm. While there have been stretches of seeming stability when the winds seem to die down a little, inevitably, they come back in gusts that knock me back into that old familiar feeling.

I think all generations have certain questions which are core to their time. One of the themes of my generation is: How do we create sturdy lives in times of instability, division, and rapid change? I take comfort in history which illustrates we are not alone in this question, though the particulars of our instability, our division, and our rapid change are unique.

One of the important particulars of our time is that when a crisis happens, we don’t just have a front row seat to the horror, we have a whole universe to explore it through right in our pockets. What is especially troubling about the universe in our pockets is that its nature is a kind of house of mirrors. Infinite perspectives on the same event, each distorted by its point of view. Our brains don’t just take in the input as information, but rather as visceral threat. One can get lost in there very easily. A lot of people do and if I am not very watchful, the universe in my pocket will pull me in and knock my spirit out. I know from experience that I cannot allow that to happen and I will guard against it in every way I can. This is one of the things I’ve learned in the past 25 years since that initial loss of innocence on September 11th, 2001.

Another thing I have learned in all these years is that I am not here to be a consumer of chaos. I am not here to fight with other people who have no power about geopolitics. I am here to love this world as best I can and do my best to create the culture I want to live in on the only scale I can: the one exactly the size of my own life.

I had an professor in college who gave me a note which hangs on a cork board over my desk: “An artist’s soul. Battle fear always to the death.” The artist, the maker, the creator and the fear – it’s always been there. The primary way I battle the fear is to build anyway, to keep creating, to be clear what I am devoted to and to keep going in that direction. No matter what.

These are windy times. I just wanted to remind you and to remind me to keep loving this world and to keep creating on your own scale. I know that you, like I, have gathered tools over your years. Tools which help you stay steady, stay sane, and stay human. These are times for us to use those. The children are watching and taking our leadership. They need our presence now. So let us not wait for things to stabilize out there to do what we’ve come here to do and be who we’ve come here to be.

I believe in us.

Love,

Chris

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