NOTICING Parallel polis
“Living in truth” — what personally matters to you
If I don’t want to be driven into a cave of fear. If I don’t want to live my days under the bedcovers. If my immediate reaction to the morning headlines bores a hole in my heart, I still have to find a way to focus on what comes first for the day ahead. The first-graders, to whom I am devoted, need my full attention, despite very bad news outside of their world. As I open the fridge for an egg, the sight of good beer looks good. It will be there when I need one. To refocus, I have to claim myself. I need me to do me. Before I leave for school, I paint for 10 minutes. A quick exercise to calm myself. I look at the sky. Spring is almost here. After teaching, I’ll bake cookies for a friend who gave me an armful of forsythia.
A tune comes to mind: a few of my favorite things. All the above are some favorite things I do each day. They parallel rampant savagery the Hooligan trumpets as wins. Just over a month in and it’s a coast-to-coast train wreck.
How are you managing the siege of the Hooligan and his unelected employee/not employee breaking every law in their sightline? (I mean, Follow the damn law! It’s not that hard.) How are you keeping your nearest neighbors close? How are you helping them to ward off nightmares, or at least console? The rhythms of the dailies are portraits of love and care: walk the dog, do the laundry, prepare dinner, put the kids to bed, meet work deadlines. I told you some of my few favorite things. What are yours? I told you some of my few favorite things. What are yours? What personally matters to you? This is not a casual question. This is not a casual question.
My not-casual question is the result of reading The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central-Eastern Europe. It is useful. Václav Havel, the Czech dramatist and political dissident wrote it illegally as samizdat in October 1978. For that, he was imprisoned. Then he was voted into office as President of Czechoslovakia. Havel shows us how to live under the barrage of lies and betrayals. It is possible. Roll over and play dead? Nope. As I said, this book is useful.
The key point of The Power of the Powerless that speaks to our American moment now is Havel’s clear and easy idea of a parallel polis. As Timothy Snyder writes in his introduction to Havel’s The Power of the Powerless, “The point of [Havel’s ideas] is not to overcome one ideology with another, displace one story with another, overwhelm one emotion with another, or to defeat a specific lie with a specific fact.”
As Havel wrote, the parallel polis is where people, in undercover political actions, rebuild “values like trust, openness, responsibility, solidarity, love.” The people of Czechoslovakia prove that a return to democracy is possible. By electing Havel in 1989 (the second time he won in a landslide victory), we can see that we too can live a parallel life to our current government. The goal is to restore our democracy.
Havel’s essay fills me with awe. And hope. It’s a roadmap that we can use now for our own purposes.
In my last two Substacks I proposed that we welcome a Third Way into our daily lives. This Third Way embraces the emotion of awe and, for inspiration, murmurations of starlings.
Awe is now recognized as the eighth emotion. Scientists studying this singular emotion contribute to a growing body of research. Awe may lead to generosity, humility, and critical thinking. Experiments in 26 cultures around the world show that awe can repair body and mind. It can deepen social relationships. It can metamorphose our sense of loneliness into the rhythms of being part of a community.
But you don’t have to take scientific findings as gospel; it’s in your body and you know it when you sense it. Awe makes visible the vast complex world which we share, not as political partisans, but as a species. From this place of calm we can breathe. In calm, maybe an Ah ha will float to mind, moving one closer to reviving our democracy.
One experience of awe is seeing the murmurations at dusk. The grace, power, and surpassing magnificence astonishes. Leaderless, agile, swift, and balletic displays of thousands of starlings collaborate to protect themselves from predators. How do they do it?
They keep their eye on the edge.
Their capabilities are the result of each single bird who keeps close to seven adjacent neighbors.
That’s it. Each bird keeps close to their seven neighbors sensing when to instantly swerve.
This is the time to swerve ourselves.
As we witness workers fired without cause, when we witness fellow humans deported, and when we come to understand how programs already approved by Congress deny (!) life-saving funds, we feel physically ill because of the wreckage happening blow by blow.
So it goes like this. Under this American government, a Third Way is a parallel polis to nourish and fortify the powerless. We need our friends so we can be ourselves and live fully alongside “the irrational momentum” of inhumane power. With our Adjacent Sevens, we can resist and we can benefit from awe, absorbing its calm and goodness. Collaboration takes fear out of the driver’s seat.
Like the Czechoslovakian people who resisted totalitarianism, we too can stay close to a few of our favorite things.
Hang with friends. Walk the dog. Learn to draw. Keep a local brewer’s beer in the fridge. With care, fold laundry for our loved ones. We are making space to live in truth according to a personal sense of what matters to each of us.
It’s gonna take practice to live with liveliness alongside this nerve-wracking, sleep-depriving, devastating mess. And still, no matter what, we can notice when awe takes our breath away.
I ask a friend, O, how she is holding close to a few of her favorite things. Knitting, Wordle and when she’s tired, “Insta looking.” It’s tax season and she’s exhausted.
In past years when O and her co-workers called the IRS on behalf of clients, it was already slow because of understaffing. As I write, 6,700 workers were fired. Getting questions answered is going to be tougher.
O is Ukrainian. She grew up under Soviet rule. As we talk, she characteristically masks her emotions, holding undercover an extraordinary range of exacting competencies, a playful wit, and a boundlessly affectionate heart. Often, she tells me, she and her classmates were taken out of school to work on collective farms. Russian was the primary language at her university. “Only three professors taught in Ukrainian.”
Her news sources about the war in Ukraine are Ukrainian media, family and friends. “It doesn’t look good.” She tells worried friends not to read the news. “For me, it is easier. I don’t have time for news.” What does she say to” her friends? “Visit family. Visit friends.” Her voice remains flat.
I ask if she would tell me about an experience of awe that she’s had. At first she starts to brush away this notion. I mention a photo she took, her voice changes. “I saw it on the news, Instagram, everyone was talking about it. It’s a phenomenon of sub-zero temperatures, fungus and wood. Then one Sunday, I went for a walk at Fragrance Lake and I saw it at my feet. That’s it! That’s it! It was the hair ice! It looks like fine, silky hair creating delicate, angel-hair-like strands in mid-air!” In the twinkling of an eye, the fatigue of her 12-hour day and nonstop worry disappear. I adore her exuberance. Her telling of that rare, mysterious winter wonder reawakens the sensation of awe. Goosebumps!
As we all somehow make our parallel way through this time, watching the Robber and Thief exceed powers given by law, we will repair and improve our country. We will continue to protect our children, love whom we love, and land on a recipe that looks delish.
Instead of anticipating with dread what tomorrow may bring, as we all do, be prepared to recognize the sweetness of friendship, care, and unexpected moments of feeling just plain good. Come to recognize your moments of awe. It’s a power we can glory in.
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Notes:
YouTube
WATCH: Gov. Ferguson speaks on federal funding impacts and response to Trump’s executive orders
https://gotcupofsugar.substack.com/p/noticing-a-third-way-for-america?r=6vskh
https://gotcupofsugar.substack.com/p/noticing-adjacent-sevens?r=6vskh
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/search?q=awe+studies
Václav Havel, The Power of the Powerless, With an introduction by Timothy Snyder, (Penguin Random House, 2018)
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/polis
“Exceeding powers given by law” https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/february-23-2025?r=6vskh&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email