Season 46: Adaptation

We have the means to destroy not only ourselves, but also to threaten the existence of future species of life that may come after us. Our maturity and experience so far yield neither wisdom nor responsibility—instead, we find ourselves in a dangerously prolonged midlife crisis, with us constantly buying civilization Harleys and embarking on wild journeys in an attempt to simulate lasting happiness, ignoring all the limits our age places on us. But as we discover, we are not the only actors who have something to say about the world. The COVID-19 crisis was seen by many as the first global crisis after a long period of seeming calm and prosperity. But can we really talk about the corona crisis as a crisis and what preceded it, as a so-called normal to which it is worth returning? Isn't it more valuable in an altered (emergency) state of consciousness to grasp this media-impactful crisis as an important backdrop that reveals our vulnerability as well as other crises threatening survival on our planet? What we witnessed in this new experience was a definitive and vivid recognition of the interconnectedness of everything — not only in our bodies, but also in our societies. Also, only recently, the clear boundary between natural and human has disappeared, and we have the opportunity to see how overlapping we all are and how we depend on each other. In short, we live in an environment for which we are jointly responsible, but which at the same time will never be fully understood and therefore remains a little out of our control forever. It is therefore inevitable to start talking about ways of adapting to this fragility and interconnectedness — an adaptation that will be either conscious or forced by external circumstances (and in the first case does not assume any certainties and guaranteed ends). The laboriously discovered and conquered world, which we wanted to completely grasp and control, is in short definitively gone, and only the one that is constantly in motion, counting on the element of the unknown and unfathomable, appears as the most realistic picture of the world. But how does one actually feel in a world of multicrises, which, moreover, is so incalculable? Is there hope to be felt? Is it possible to adapt without joy? When did this whole crisis start? Is it not associated with an excess of human occurrence? After all, isn't all organic life (in the otherwise inorganic Universe) an excess? And what if crises and excesses are the essence of our being, because outside of them only the “normality” of death and non-existence awaits us? Crisis and exces as our living space. Human and non-human. Joy of the creative potential of the unknown. We're still here. We are more than we thought. ADAPTATION.

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