I was reading through some of my past work the other day, and stumbled across a piece I wrote in September of 2020 entitled Reducing the Noise of 2020. What struck me most was this sense of stepping into a time capsule; how we are all re-living much of the same chaos and uncertainties of those historic months nearly five years ago.

I’ve grown a lot in what has felt like the lifetime since my home first closed its doors in March of 2020. I’ve fallen in love with hobbies, friends, family, and communities. I’ve gotten sober, relapsed, and worked to get sober again. I’ve loved unconditionally and lost deeply. I’ve laughed high-pitched giggles and sobbed in desperate grief. I’ve been on the brink of divorce and back to newlywed love more than once. I’ve received crippling medical diagnoses and discovered unfathomable healing.

I am not the same person I was when I first brought pen to paper all those years ago but –

somehow I find myself swimming in the same collective fear, grief, anger, despair, and noise that became my self-imposed cage back in 2020.

When I wrote that original piece, we were in the midst of true, cataclysmic change. 9-5 jobs were replaced with kitchen tables full of parents and children working side-by-side. 7:00 didn’t consist of crammed subway cars or gridlocked traffic; it was our collective “Gratitude Hour” – a time when, every day, we came together as a community and said the simple but powerful, “Thank you.” Thousands were taking to the streets to protest systematic racism. Our planet was healing and growing wild once more. Packages were delayed and the idea of “next day Prime” was a fleeting memory from the past. We went grocery shopping in the hours of the early morning or late at night, shopping only for what we could get and nothing more.

It was a terrifying, devastating time; but it was also the awakening our world has been aching for.

Just as I wrote in 2020, there is an awful lot of noise right now. Opposing political parties scream at each other (in person and behind online usernames). No matter what time you turn it on, the news is filled to the brim with war, natural disasters, conflict, and international turmoil. And in my part of this Big Blue Planet, things have never felt so uncertain.

It’s easy to fall down the rabbit hole of worry and anxiety; hell, our devices are quite literally designed to keep us scrolling, reading, and watching. We live in a world where people can be cancelled in a moment’s notice; where the soundest wisdom can be drowned out by the flashiest sound byte trending on TikTok.

It’s easy to get caught in the trap – to throw your hands up and scream, “What the actual fuck!?”

I’ve been quick to jump into the swampy pit of despair – wondering if this really is the way it all ends. And yet…something subtle whispers in my ear.

It’s so soft that sometimes I can barely make out a word or even a vowel.

But yet, it is always there.

That voice is my Inner Knowing, that indescribable piece of my being that was born from the ethers and will be here long after Donald Trump’s reign of terror comes to a close. The Knowing is brave, trusting, and most of all…deeply rooted in Love.

One of my dearest teachers Ram Dass was said to have a framed picture of Donald Trump on his meditation altar before his death in 2019. When asked why he had placed it amongst Hindu statues, bunches of wild flowers, and paintings of his beloved guru, he simply responded that his job in this life was to learn how to love the unloveable. In other words, his karma asked him to see if there was any room in his boundless heart for a man he so openly despised.

I’m a long way from putting Donald Trump’s photo anywhere in my home, let alone the most sacred piece of it, but I see the point.

I’m a firm believer that our hearts carry a limitless amount of compassion and love; it is our minds that tell us, “No, not him.” So I can’t help but wonder if this is why we’re replaying the same 2020 song five years later. Did we learn our lessons? Or did we stumble back into bad habits, falling prey to our most egotistical desires?

What if, and here me out for a second…

we chose to Love one another instead?

What if I – You – We – Me – could close the laptop screens and turn off the phones to communicate with one another soul-to-soul. What if we started every conversation, every encounter, every second of our sacred interconnected web of time from a place of Love?

What a radical, rebellious, revolutionary thought Love can be.

That’s my practice, anyway. It’s messy as hell, and deeply imperfect. And while my skin still crawls at his mention, these days my mind eventually drifts to the depths of my imagination where I picture Ram Dass, sitting at the foot of his altar, chuckling and smiling as he looks our 47th President.

That draws a smirk from the corners of my mouth…maybe it does for you too.