![]() Hamblin: When I think of the role of religion in American life, it’s especially involved at life transitions-births and marriages and deaths-even for people who aren’t regularly religious. ![]() So it sounds like we have to do this for ourselves, because there’s not someone showing you how we come together. At least at the federal level, we’re not having leaders model grief in a way that we’re used to seeing. I think we really have got to reckon with this reality. That hasn’t been the case in New Zealand. This pandemic really caused people to really ask some serious existential questions, like, Is this the end? At what point do we realize that losing over 100,000 people to a virus is not normal and it didn’t have to be this way? That has not been the case in South Korea. Uwan: Yeah, I think in some ways it was well forced upon us. In a situation like this one, how do you know when you’re at the point where you need to do radical acceptance? We don’t have the physical evidence in front of us, and playing out on a timescale that makes it harder to grasp. James Hamblin: Well, I think when a person in your life dies or when there’s been a big natural disaster or an attack on a city and buildings are crumbled, then there’s this hard reality in front of you. It feels like we don’t have a lot of good models for acceptance right now in the public. I think we see a lot of that on a macro level with the government. But denial just exacerbates our suffering. People are dealing with so many compounding issues. Even grief is an act of radical acceptance, because accepting reality for what it is is hard. My goodness-think about the grief that comes with that. ![]() Or even take another instance: We have over 100,000 people who have died from COVID-19. Wells: So radical acceptance is about action? What about the grocery-store clerk that’s checking out my groceries? What does that mean to to look out for somebody that you do not know? That person is your neighbor. Accepting reality would mean that I’m going to go to the grocery store only when I need to do that, because I’m considering the needs of somebody else. Once you do that, what is the next step? What does that look like?Įkemini Uwan: It looks like: We begin to change our lives in service, not only to our loved ones, but also in service to our neighbors. It’s one thing to realize how the system works: This is how this country is working right now, these are the failures, these are the people being harmed. Katherine Wells: I want to talk to you about this idea you wrote about in your piece. What follows is an edited and condensed transcript of their conversation. Subscribe to Social Distance on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or another podcast platform to receive new episodes as soon as they’re published.
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