Our World Is as Fragile as Glass

It’s true; our world is fragile as glass in so many ways. The climate is fragile and we are trampling on its infinite complexity with ignorance and abandon. Our social order, with its complex web of custom and civil behavior, is fraying; as face-to-face interaction wanes during Covid, web-fueled impatience and rage are becoming the norm. And our personal life, formerly organized around stable relationships and daily routines, is upended. Even our very sense of what is real and true is subject to this fragility. In terms of personal life, I read that the average weight gain during the two years of Covid–average!–is 29 pounds. That means there are some people that gained much more than that. Think of what that must mean in terms of anxiety, depressed mood, and isolation, as well as the long-term health consequences. We would not be too far off to think that our whole world is falling apart.

I read recently about Thwaite’s glacier–sometimes called the Doomsday glacier. It is a massive glacier in Antarctica that is melting at an alarming rate. Should Thwaite’s glacier melt completely, it would raise sea levels by two feet— flooding vast agricultural areas and many coastal cities around the world. A glacier is made of ice– a kind of glass. I think of this glacier as like a sheet of glass, able to shatter into a thousand pieces at any time. Are we walking any more carefully? Does the fate of Thwaite’s make headlines the world over? Not really. Most people other than scientists haven’t even heard about it. But if it shatters, all of South Florida, as well as all of lower Manhattan would simply disappear, as well as major coastal cities all over the world. You may say, well, I don’t live in those places, but in a larger sense we all do.

When I lived in a rural Buddhist retreat center, Jerry, an older man who was part Native American, lived with us and was a kind of elder advisor about the natural world. Once, when a group of us were hiking, he suddenly said, “Stop!” We all froze. “Don’t step on that,” he said, pointing at the ground. “That’s Yerba Buena, that’s a medicine plant. We never step on that.”

Consider a culture– like the one Jerry was raised in– that was so sensitive to its surroundings that its people were trained to watch every step and respect every plant. That’s a culture that recognized that the world was is indeed as fragile as glass, and lived and acted accordingly. Think how far distant our modern world is from such a worldview. If we live in a city, we barely see the natural world. We don’t see the stars, we don’t register the phases of the moon, we don’t “walk in beauty” to use a phrase that reflects how life once was, long ago, when people depended on the land for survival and appreciated its beauty. Such a culture lives in a different reality than ours, a reality suffused with sensitivity to the subtle balances of the natural world and of human relations. Aside from the reality supposed by scientists– which itself is a web of experimental results built up out of repeatable observations of nature– what we experience as “real” is more tentative than we suppose. Is what we experience on social media “real?” Will the so-called metaverse, if it ever comes to fruition, be real or imaginary?

Much of what we say is real is what those around us and those that speak with a loud megaphone say is real. It’s sometimes hard to know. Is the Covid vaccine– to take a case from today’s headlines– a life-saving medicine or an untested poison that kills people? Who’s talking? When I was a kid, the nightly news ended with Walter Cronkite looking into the camera and saying with conviction, “And that’s the way it is.”

Now we have to say, “And that’s the way some people say it is but others say different.” Perhaps we will get through this period of uncertainty and chaos and come together again in one piece. That happened after other great world crises, like World War II. Or perhaps we won’t. That uncertainty itself makes us feel fragile.

So let’s keep our fingers crossed– an interesting expression in itself. Will crossing our fingers really help? Is that real? Does it matter?

Something to ponder.