Pockets.

In between the events of meals and workshops at the Peace Corps training center in Dedza, and engaging in activities such as accidentally tearing my dress open in front of many amused Peace Corps volunteers and embarrassed Malawians, one of my fellow volunteers started talking about the hopelessness of how often people’s reaction to beauty is to claim it. This usually leads to a destruction of beauty or at the very least it blocks it off from others, claiming beauty as something for a privileged few. This thought led into discussion of how people only act from a place of self-preservation and how people revolve around a self-centered way of being.

It’s hard to know what to work for when you’re caught in a view that centers on people helping others only to help themselves. It’s difficult to see people working for others only to shield themselves from inevitable loneliness. And not everyone defaults to helping others when the loneliness starts; many exert control over others or work to gain power by any means. Even before my work as a Peace Corps volunteer it’s always been a struggle when a real radical change seems impossible based off of the common motive of self-preservation.

I do think this is true about people and their motives and selfish concerns, but at the end of the day what so bad about being self-preserving if one acknowledges that part of self-preserving is helping to preserve others? As I have talked about in other posts, part of self-preservation is recognizing yourself as part of a greater whole, being closely linked, connected, and tied to others. Who really cares if people at the core are selfish if part of being selfish necessitates not just taking care of the “me,” but also the “me” that’s part of the “us?” I for one don’t really care at this point what the true motives are as long as they include somewhat of a holistic process of taking care of each other. I think more problems arise when people mix their selfish intentions with denial, denying that they need others. This frequently applies to the natural environment when a true selfish preservation would care more than we do about cleaning our air and normalizing the weather patterns.

As the state of the environment and world worsens there is less and less time to confront denial about the necessity of clean air and solidly frozen ice caps. There is less and less time to believe that ultimate power and control will truly act as a substitute for true comfort in all those times of loneliness.

All of this aside, I do believe there is also a small space, a small pocket that could lead to change, that holds a miraculous type of hope, and that exists beyond people’s attempts at self-preservation, power, and control. A space that exists, because no matter how many people see beauty and proceed to claim it, ruin it, take it away, there will always, always, be people who see beauty and believe in it for no real or logical reason.