Recently, under our current conditions, I have been thinking about what it was like growing up in the 1960s. I was a kid. In 1960 I was 4 and in 1970 I was 14. So I was too young to be an actual participant, I was just a school kid out on the periphery unable to really have any understanding of it all. Every generation inherits a storm. What follows is a reflection on that feeling: not just of living through unstable, changing times, but of learning how to move with it.
Dancing on One Toe in a Whirlwind
Sometimes I think we’re all born into somebody else’s mess. Not just one mess, but the sediment of centuries - layer upon layer of old mistakes, unfinished griefs, blind ambition, shattered hopes, power grabs, misjudged wars, broken treaties, forgotten promises, marketing slogans, religious fervor, and the stray shards of family secrets no one ever had the tools or courage to clean up. By the time we show up, it’s already in motion. We step into a world already spinning.
That’s the feeling I keep circling back to when I try to describe what it was like growing up in the 1960s. Like opening your eyes in the middle of a cultural cyclone. Protests in the streets, body bags on the news, cities burning, presidents shot, prophets silenced, rock stars flashing across the sky and then vanishing into overdose and myth. People panicking over hair length, God, acid, the draft, Black Power, advertising jingles, the Free Love movement, and whatever was left of yesterday’s innocence. It was all happening at once, like a carousel with the safety bolts removed.
There was an urgency to it, a kind of beauty too - ragged and holy. But also something utterly banal about it, as if chaos had been normalized. As if the whirlwind had always been there and always would be.
And maybe it has. Maybe it’s not unique to the Sixties. Drop into ancient Babylon, a battlefield in the Hundred Years’ War, a famine-struck Irish village, or a street corner this morning, and you’ll find it: the same human swirl, the same grinding dance of trauma and striving, passion and collapse. Different masks, different debris. Same storm.
Which makes me wonder about the storm itself. Not just as a metaphor, but as a physics problem. A real thing. How does a whirlwind hold itself together?
I pictured it: twigs, receipts, broken toys, plastic wrappers, a pickup truck door, a copy of Catcher in the Rye, the farm house from The Wizard of OZ - all flying in a great ring. It hit me: the whirlwind doesn’t survive by finding balance in the traditional sense. It doesn’t need stillness or symmetry. What it needs is movement. Perpetual motion. The illusion of order shaped by imbalance in motion. It’s not about everything having equal weight, it’s about everything staying in relationship while spinning.
That’s what my childhood felt like. That’s what growing up felt like. Not standing on solid ground, but spinning with the mess while trying to figure it out. Not in control, but not entirely lost either. Caught up in a motion that had been going long before I was born and would keep going long after I was gone.
Most of us, back then, were too busy ducking debris to ask what it all meant. Too busy surviving the spin to question the storm. But somewhere in the middle of that mess, I learned something I still hold onto: balance isn’t the absence of motion. Balance isn’t calm. Balance is responsiveness. It’s improvisation. It’s the dancer, not the statue.
I used to think peace would come when everything finally stopped. If I could just hold everything still long enough, I could rest. But that kind of peace always felt like death to me. Sterile. Lifeless. Unreal.
Never the less, in the center of every whirlwind there is a place of relative calm around which the rest is spinning. Finding that center and staying close to it is the most stable place to be. We learned that lesson from the school yard merry-go-round. Whoever stayed in the center didn’t get thrown off.
The kind of balance I’ve come to trust feels more like dancing on one toe in a hurricane. It’s dynamic. It listens. It yields. It’s knowing how to lean just enough, how to keep moving with the wind without being carried away. It is about finding the center and staying close to it, It’s learning when to bend, when to duck, when to let go. It’s a kind of grace - not in spite of the mess, but inside it.
That’s what grief feels like. That’s what life feels like. That’s what being a child in the 1960s felt like. Not preserving order, but moving within disorder. Not preventing the fall, but learning how to fall and still rise. Again and again.
Balance, I’ve come to believe, isn’t a final state. It’s a relationship with instability. It’s a quiet wisdom in your bones, telling you how to shift your weight just right, so you don’t collapse when the world tilts again.
So you don’t stiffen into stillness, but stay alive to the dance.
Even now, I still feel it: the spin, the sway, the storm just outside my window. But I’ve learned to stand in it - not braced, not broken, but balanced.
One toe, one breath, one beat at a time and staying centered.
Dancing in the whirlwind.
FOOTER:
If this piece resonates with you, I’d love to hear from you. What was the whirlwind you woke up inside? How do you find your balance in it?
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With gratitude for your presence on the path,
Cecil
I suppose if you grew up in tornado country, that would probably be one of the most frightening things you could think of from an early age, finding a way to live with with it without letting it rule your life (living in constant fear).
I was born in 1952, in an area of California that was fairly stable as far as weather and environment. The worst we ever got was an occasional earthquake that rocked your equilibrium, sometimes causing nausea. Some brick buildings might fall but not often unless they were built in the 1800s.
I think as a comparison, we lived in a town that bordered the Sacramento River. Until levees became more reliably engineered there were annual floods, however, I never experienced a devastating one, only on a few streets or older sections of town. The most dangerous thing I had to deal with, and I never dealt with by choice, was undertow in the river.
My brother taught me if I wanted to swim in the river, I had to learn the rules. If you ever got caught in the undertow, you MUST relax and let it carry you until it ran its course. If you tried to fight it, it would keep you under the water. Someone every year died from the undertow, from drunk teenagers to people driving off levee roads with no side rails. It was disconcerting when someone you knew was drowned by swiftly flowing currents. It seemed so baseless to me.
I found the 1960’s to be an exciting time as a child, experiencing new things such as TV, transistor radios, space travel, Barbie Dolls, and pointy brassieres. Fashion, Art, and Music changed, bringing forward new eclectic styles, abstract art, moody music, and the promise of freedom from “the establishment.” But also traditional guard rails were torn down, and exposed one to more exploratory, challenging lifestyles. To me it was like a fast spinning Ferris Wheel with no guard rails.
But with all eras, changes are inevitable because we as humans for the most part are changeable, emerging beings and are constantly looking for “somethings” to change. Or creating new things from old techniques. Or reinventing old things with new techniques. At least this is the way I see it, people look into crystal balls or bubbling cauldrons seeking answers and new possibilities.
I see this as a transitional era, and the sky is the limit, balance is a state of mind, and fear is a willingness to deny that we create our own world.
Growth up in the 80s was pretty much the same, different symptoms but the same storm. Cold war, nuclear sabre rattling, AIDS, famine, stock market collapse, etc.
I too have been looking for balance, but I've been trying to place that I am comfortable with somewhere between awareness and ignorance. Where is the point where I know enough without knowing too much?
We need to be able to exist within this cyclone from one day to the next, somewhere between furious anger and blasé complacency, for our own safety and sanity.
That's where I feel that the dance truly lies...