I just now noticed this story. Nice. Kum Taka Rest - great. made me laugh. I recently wrote something in the neighborhood of the subject...
"Sometimes I think all of us—no matter when we’re born—waking up into somebody else’s mess. Not just one mess, but the accumulated wreckage of generation after generation of messes. Wars, lies, mistak…
I just now noticed this story. Nice. Kum Taka Rest - great. made me laugh. I recently wrote something in the neighborhood of the subject...
"Sometimes I think all of us—no matter when we’re born—waking up into somebody else’s mess. Not just one mess, but the accumulated wreckage of generation after generation of messes. Wars, lies, mistakes, accidents, stupid decisions, bad guesses, heartbreaks, power grabs, fear, resentment, ambition, survival and all the leftover junk no one ever cleaned up. It’s all still swirling around when we get here.
When I try to explain what it was like growing up in the 1960s, that’s what keeps coming back to me. The feeling of stepping into the middle of a cultural whirlwind. Protests, assassinations, rock stars dying, the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, people freaking out about hair length and music and drugs and God and the government, corporations and institutions and endless commercials trying to sell people things they didn’t know they needed. It was all flying past at once—loud, urgent, dangerous, strangely beautiful and at the same time commonplace as if everything was exactly as it was supposed to be.
But I’m not sure it was any more complicated than any other time. You could probably drop down into ancient Rome or the Dust Bowl or a Tuesday in 1437 or a Wednesday this week and find the same spinning mess—just in different costumes. The names change, but the chaos feels familiar on both a grand scale and right in your own house. A constant maelstrom.
Which got me wondering about the whirlwind itself. Not just as a metaphor, but as a real thing. I mean—how does a whirlwind even work? How does it keep going?
I imagined all the swirling debris—twigs, leaves, paper cups, the house in Wizard of Oz, whatever—and it occurred to me: wouldn’t the whirlwind need to keep that debris evenly distributed in order to keep its shape? Wouldn’t an imbalance throw it off? If everything got stuck in one corner, wouldn’t it collapse?
But then I realized—it doesn’t need balance the way we think of balance. Not stillness. Not fairness. It needs movement. It’s not about equal weight on every side, it’s about constant motion. The whole thing stays alive by not holding still. It’s a kind of organized chaos—just enough order to keep from falling apart, just enough disorder to keep from becoming rigidly predictable.
That’s how it felt growing up. I wasn’t in control of anything, but I was inside something. Something spinning. Something carrying all of us forward, even if we didn’t know where it was going.
And just like a real whirlwind, most of us were too busy ducking flying debris to wonder what the point of it was.
I used to think balance meant stillness. Like if you could just stop everything, quiet it all down, and get things perfectly even, you’d find peace. But that kind of balance always felt like death to me. The real kind of balance - the kind I’ve learned to live - isn’t sitting on your butt with your legs crossed and your hands folded. It’s more like spinning on one toe in the middle of a storm.
That’s what life feels like. What grief feels like. What being a child in the middle of the 1960s felt like.
It wasn’t about keeping things from falling. It was about staying upright while they did. It was about learning to move with everything that was moving around me—assassinations, wars, family breakdowns, dead rock stars, dead brothers. The wind never stopped. The flying debris never stopped. But somehow, there’s this strange kind of grace in staying up anyway. Even if it’s just for another spin.
Balance, I’ve come to believe, is not found in the absence of motion. It’s relationship with motion. It’s learning to feel where the center is, even as the ground shifts. It’s knowing when to lean, when to pivot, when to let go – to bend with the wind, to move with the current.
I just realized I mentioned the wrong Russian, and I spelled his name wrong anyhow. It was Mikhail Gorbachev who stated “if you aren’t moving forward, you are moving backwards.”
I just now noticed this story. Nice. Kum Taka Rest - great. made me laugh. I recently wrote something in the neighborhood of the subject...
"Sometimes I think all of us—no matter when we’re born—waking up into somebody else’s mess. Not just one mess, but the accumulated wreckage of generation after generation of messes. Wars, lies, mistakes, accidents, stupid decisions, bad guesses, heartbreaks, power grabs, fear, resentment, ambition, survival and all the leftover junk no one ever cleaned up. It’s all still swirling around when we get here.
When I try to explain what it was like growing up in the 1960s, that’s what keeps coming back to me. The feeling of stepping into the middle of a cultural whirlwind. Protests, assassinations, rock stars dying, the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, people freaking out about hair length and music and drugs and God and the government, corporations and institutions and endless commercials trying to sell people things they didn’t know they needed. It was all flying past at once—loud, urgent, dangerous, strangely beautiful and at the same time commonplace as if everything was exactly as it was supposed to be.
But I’m not sure it was any more complicated than any other time. You could probably drop down into ancient Rome or the Dust Bowl or a Tuesday in 1437 or a Wednesday this week and find the same spinning mess—just in different costumes. The names change, but the chaos feels familiar on both a grand scale and right in your own house. A constant maelstrom.
Which got me wondering about the whirlwind itself. Not just as a metaphor, but as a real thing. I mean—how does a whirlwind even work? How does it keep going?
I imagined all the swirling debris—twigs, leaves, paper cups, the house in Wizard of Oz, whatever—and it occurred to me: wouldn’t the whirlwind need to keep that debris evenly distributed in order to keep its shape? Wouldn’t an imbalance throw it off? If everything got stuck in one corner, wouldn’t it collapse?
But then I realized—it doesn’t need balance the way we think of balance. Not stillness. Not fairness. It needs movement. It’s not about equal weight on every side, it’s about constant motion. The whole thing stays alive by not holding still. It’s a kind of organized chaos—just enough order to keep from falling apart, just enough disorder to keep from becoming rigidly predictable.
That’s how it felt growing up. I wasn’t in control of anything, but I was inside something. Something spinning. Something carrying all of us forward, even if we didn’t know where it was going.
And just like a real whirlwind, most of us were too busy ducking flying debris to wonder what the point of it was.
I used to think balance meant stillness. Like if you could just stop everything, quiet it all down, and get things perfectly even, you’d find peace. But that kind of balance always felt like death to me. The real kind of balance - the kind I’ve learned to live - isn’t sitting on your butt with your legs crossed and your hands folded. It’s more like spinning on one toe in the middle of a storm.
That’s what life feels like. What grief feels like. What being a child in the middle of the 1960s felt like.
It wasn’t about keeping things from falling. It was about staying upright while they did. It was about learning to move with everything that was moving around me—assassinations, wars, family breakdowns, dead rock stars, dead brothers. The wind never stopped. The flying debris never stopped. But somehow, there’s this strange kind of grace in staying up anyway. Even if it’s just for another spin.
Balance, I’ve come to believe, is not found in the absence of motion. It’s relationship with motion. It’s learning to feel where the center is, even as the ground shifts. It’s knowing when to lean, when to pivot, when to let go – to bend with the wind, to move with the current.
It’s dancing on one toe in a whirlwind."
I just realized I mentioned the wrong Russian, and I spelled his name wrong anyhow. It was Mikhail Gorbachev who stated “if you aren’t moving forward, you are moving backwards.”