One Day You'll Lose Your Idealism

But what if you didn't?

You can pretend for a long time, Jean Rhys wrote in Wide Sargasso Sea, but one day it all falls away and you are alone. We are alone in the most beautiful place in the world. 

I kept thinking of Eden while in the Drake Bay area of Costa Rica the other week. I understood EB White’s confession that he woke up everyday torn between fighting to save the world and allowing himself to enjoy it. 

I traveled to Costa Rica with my family, but I made sure to schedule alone time. I found a secluded wooden perch over the rainforest. I brought my morning coffee there to watch birds, and tried to sink into my own deep quiet as the healthy forest hummed with life. Those still moments of watching felt healing.

It wasn’t uncomplicated, being there. There’s nothing environmentally friendly about travel, and participating in a tourist economy feels like being complicit in some sort of colonial scheme (reading suggestion: Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place.)

Lately, though, everywhere feels complicated. The crackle of tension and degradation is in the collective air. This absolves nothing, but is something I’ve sensed on all my travels during my sabbatical year.

One afternoon, during a rainstorm, I watched two Scarlet Macaws fly into the canopy of a tree near the eco-lodge for shelter. Monogamous, they preened, complained, copulated, groomed, and repositioned as the wind changed. I couldn’t believe my luck - a full cup of coffee and a close view of neotropical parrots in the wild. 

These parrots will be in one another’s company for up to 90 years, all day. Every day. (Forever, forever ever, for ever ever).

As the rain subsided, the local yellow-throated toucan pair landed nearby. The hummingbirds darted out (there are an estimated 53 species of hummingbirds in Costa Rica) and I noticed one in particular making its rounds - the long-billed hermit, which seemed to check the blooms on the bird of paradise plant every few minutes with its curved bill. The brilliance of co-evolution and the pleasure of a healthy landscape rang clear. No Home Depot decor, no chemically-drenched grounds.

As I was watching the insanely rich biodiversity around me - I felt walloped by awe. Often this awe was followed by a wave of nausea. It’s all so stunning - so interconnected - and so damn fragile I can hardly bear it.

Though Costa Rica leads with impressive foresight - aiming to decarbonize by 2050, choosing an eco-tourist economy over just a tourist economy, and maintaining over 58 wildlife refuges - they are a tiny country situated between two rising seas, plagued by increasing heat and earthquakes. Experts suspect the country has a 40% chance of experiencing a catastrophic tsunami in the next 50 years. 

Do you sense this fragility wherever you go? That the places you love are in danger? 

Enjoy every Eden while you can, I think. Enjoy coffee with the macaws and hummingbirds. The sound of my young daughters laughing in the pool. Each relationship, each moment, each microenvironment and every soundscape you love - fleeting.

*

One day you’ll lose your idealism. 

This is something people used to say to me as a child. And I can understand why. I was always wandering around emoting, writing dark poetry, lamenting general cruelty, brooding over the way things “should” be. And I hear this expression still - in politics, in workplaces, in life, in environmental decision making. 

Have you lost your idealism? Do you grieve it?

I remember the first day my youngest daughter overheard an NPR reporter comment on one country bombing another. She was perhaps 4 or 5 years old. She didn’t say anything at that moment, but held the news close, mulling it over, trying to understand it on her own, as children do. 

That night, as I was running water over her hair in the bath, she said to me: was it aliens? Was it aliens that dropped bombs? Because -

She couldn’t fathom that humans would harm one another. 

It makes my heart ache to remember that moment of comprehension, her big eyes staring up at me from the bathtub, her hair slicked back. 

Shouldn’t this kind of harm be unfathomable? 

I am thinking of the killing of hundreds of Palestinians, who were starving and waiting in line for flour. I am thinking of Yulia Navalnaya stepping into her new reality of grief and work. Thousands of humpbacks - highly intelligent marine mammals - dying since 2012 because of marine heatwaves, caused by human activity. The bird life of Costa Rica in a heatwave or wreckage of a future tsunami. All the living, breathing collateral damage in the wake of human greed and cruelty.

At what point in our lives do we accept that cruelty and loss happens with alarming regularity? And that largely we learn to go about the cold business of our lives as other humans and species struggle? And that we may or may not be complicit in this suffering through our own lifestyles and inaction.

What would the world be like if we were encouraged to hold onto our childhood idealism longer, and the notion that we should treat others tenderly? 

I hate the notion that idealists and dreamers are childlike, impotent, and watching on the sidelines powerless. I don’t think that’s true, and I regret each idealist we lose along the way. I regret our culture’s reverence for those who perform power and bludgeon others with it.

I read Ronan Farrow’s interview with RuPaul in the New Yorker the other morning over coffee and nodded gingerly when the second paragraph revealed that America’s most prominent drag queen is also a prepper.

“I’m fearing the absolute worst,” Rupaul said. “Humans on this planet are in the cycle of destruction. I am plotting a safety net,” he continued, referencing his partner’s 60,000 acre ranch in Wyoming.

I don’t disagree.

It seems to me that we don’t know exactly what’s coming (Political instability? More violence? Ecological tipping points? Water shortage? Another pandemic? The era of compound crises?), but we all seem to know a shift is in the wings, and we’re trying in our various ways to cope with that vague and harrowing notion, and negotiate our future emotional and physical safety within it.

*

In Costa Rica, the eco lodge staff would alert guests if wildlife were cruising through the grounds. Some days it was a roving group of spider monkeys, a pregnant tapir, or the world’s most poisonous spider. One day a groundsperson found a sloth, and we rushed to view it. 

A white-faced capuchin, exploring with purpose

A sloth sighting is surprisingly joyful, though the sloth itself is a study in slow-motion. It’s like looking at an old mop in a tree. The slot is painfully gentle in its motions and behavior.

For decades, no one knew why sloths risked their lives once a week to bury their excrement on the forest floor. In short - there is an entire ecosystem alive in the fur and excrement of sloths, a cycle of life for moths and algae. This gentle and mysterious being, which risks death every time it descends, hosts life, and is a study in the power of mutual health and symbiotic behavior. 

As I wrote last month, I feel humbled and inspired by interconnectedness of our planet, and I feel if more people stopped to witness and understand even a fraction of the wonder, we’d fight to save more.

I think the trick is finding the very specific species or place you love most, and starting there.

Watching from the river as one spider monkey creates a bridge with her body so another can cross

“I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man,” EB White once wrote in a letter, “if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.”

Here’s to spending your time both enjoying the sweetness of the natural world, and fighting to save it. 

x

MMB

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Some Extras:

-Listen to an interview I gave on managing creative lives, southern environmental writing, and hate mail with The Creative Independent

-Why do I write this Substack?