A Heart-Breaking Divide

Increasingly, I find myself divided, pulled apart by opposing forces.

On the one hand, I am called to surrender my beliefs, my selfish and childish clinging to my own rightness in both political and personal affairs. It is the tragedy of ego-based interaction and socialization that leads me to seek salvation in the higher realms of religion and spirituality. Many a spiritual path beckons, asking me to trade conventional socialization and petty concerns for a loving attitude of selfless service. This path of self-annihilation finds its highest expression in charity, an unconditional giving of what I naively held to be 'mine' in the financial, psychological and spiritual realms. To be attached to a particular agenda other than one of indiscriminate love is anathema to this path.

On the other hand, I am called to serve humanity by joining the fight for a better world, to build up power from below and exert it to change society for the better. Perceiving the living Hell that is 21st century capitalism ever more clearly, I am compelled to take contrarian and rebellious action. Ultimately, what the political activities of the radical Left boils down to is the formation and harnessing of collective identities. It cannot be otherwise, nor should it, for to change the world requires a reshuffling of power, which in turn requires struggle. And in order to participate meaningfully in struggle, the very first thing I need to reject is my faux sense of neutrality; to live a political life is to be committed, ''a priori,'' to a camp, a side, a position. It is to say ''OK, boomer,'' and to shout ''no justice, no peace, f*ck the police!''

Thoroughly (but not desperately) bothered by this conundrum, I seek solutions to this dilemma. I find, though, that neither of these forces is soluble in the other. To believe that a better world is the result merely of improved individual behaviour is to abolish politics, to calm one's mind in an unacceptable cover-up of existing hierarchies. Whereas the suspension of all personal work till ''after the revolution'' is, similarly, to miss the point and shift responsibility.

But I know (or, rather, I think that I know) that to do nothing is the worst choice, trading uncertain gains for certain delusion and uselessness. I thus find myself moving, grasping in the dark, not knowing for certain where I go. I try to walk firmly, at a steady pace. Although I have never stumbled and fallen, I am naturally afraid of the road ahead, hesitant to trust in what lies before me. It is in this way, then, that I move - not necessarily forward, or in any particular direction at all.