And yet, here we are.

I’ve been thinking a lot about time travel lately (I suspect watching the Outlander series on Netflix has something to do with it). It’s a fascinating topic that lets us indulge in “what if?” scenarios and ethical thought experiments. The recent popular one being: if you could go back in time would you kill baby Hitler?

The fantasy of travelling back in time to prevent tragedy and therefore suffering is crazy appealing. I don’t think anyone (aside from sociopaths) is a fan of tragedy and suffering. However, the human experience appears to be chock full of it.

On a deep level we know that at least some suffering is part of the deal (hence the prevalence of anxiety disorders). At some point between the time of your first inhale and your final exhale you’re going to get your ass kicked. No one is immune. If you’re lucky, it’s only once. But most of us aren’t so lucky. I think this is why we’re so drawn to the archetypal hero’s journey in literature and film. When we root for the underdog as he/she faces all sorts of seemingly impossible challenges we’re really rooting for ourselves.

Of course, it’s understandable that we’d prefer to avoid suffering. A few years back when the much-anticipated (and feared) Mayan calendar end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it 2012 prophecy was approaching I recall a healthy number of people believing that on December 21, 2012 there would be a sort of magical cosmic shift that would result in a huge leap in human consciousness and that when we woke up on December 22 we’d be living in the dawn of a golden age. But to me that would have been cheating – the equivalent of humanity being gifted a “get out of jail free” card. Things just don’t work that way. (It’s probably no surprise that this perspective has earned me the moniker “little ray of sunshine.”)

For consciousness to evolve we’ve got to face our shit, individually and collectively – to take a trip into the darkness and directly address our ugliness, become aware of our deceptions, confront our fears and heal our insecurities. If the process was easy, there wouldn’t be any growth.

It seems we have some work to do . . .

Just when you thought the world couldn’t get any crazier, the US elects the World’s Greatest Used Car Salesman as president. Anticipating what might come of this development has spawned a healthy dose of concern in some and outright panic in others. However, if you look at current events as part of a broader global dismemberment humanity is experiencing (and needs to experience) in order to evolve, the chaos begins to take on a different meaning. In classic shamanic dismemberment, an individual goes through the process of death and rebirth much like the phoenix rising out of the ashes. Specifically, the person you thought you were is symbolically destroyed in order to reveal a more authentic version of yourself.

So if you apply that process to the population at large, you’ve got yourself a big hairy mess. But from where I stand, we won’t be able to move forward until all of our dirty laundry is brought out in the open. It’s a whole lot of NOT FUN, but it’s necessary and definitely worth it. Anything else is denial. Sure, you can try to shove your rank laundry back in the closet, but the smell will only get worse until the tendrils of rancid odor reach out from under the closet door, intermingle with the Vanilla Passion Fruit Glade plugin air freshener you bought to disguise the smell and then proceed to stain your olfactory system until you’re forced to do something about it.

This is how we heal and grow. This is how we get our power back. We can’t skip to the happy ending or go back to a time when the world was flat. What we can do is strive to understand and take care of each other, grab a bucket of popcorn and root for the underdog.