Full Circle, Black Inc, Melbourne, 2021

When reality doesn’t fit the model, she’s trying to teach us something. Ludlam, 2021

When confronted with a chaotic world from which earlier certainties and ideals seem to have vanished it’s tempting to re-focus on more manageable versions of the here-and-now. Familiar strategies include passive entertainment, such as binging on TV, family and friends, hobbies, reading, staying fit and so on. Such strategies are certainly not without value but they also create an immediate distancing effect. The big issues, the engines that drive world events fade, become abstract and comfortably remote. Better to focus on what’s within reach than be frustrated by more challenging issues and the hard questions they pose. It’s understandable, up to a point that, after many months battling Covid, not many people do feel up to it. Most have had enough and long for this period of privation, danger and frighteningly random death to end. Framed in those terms such hopes will be fulfilled since this particular pandemic will wind down in due course. At the same time, we already know that there will be others. What to do? —> Read more…