Framing Numbness
Author: Patti Cobian Issue: 2024-05-01
Framing Numbness
by Patti Cobian
I enjoy excavating phrases, ideas or concepts whose popular use tends to be casual or seemingly “throw-away” in nature. It reminds me of playing in the archeological exhibit at the Chicago Children’s Museum when I was five, gently brushing and digging along the edges of enormous plastic dinosaur skeletons that lay a few inches below the sand, bringing their form and size into greater clarity and visibility.
One such idea has recently captured my imagination: at first, its outline appeared to be small, an unassuming nub in the vast sandbox of ideas, easy to dismiss. As I survey it now, I feel the same wide-eyed excitement that I did so many years ago, when what appeared to be a single, small, solitary bone would reveal itself to be the knuckle bone of an entire skeleton.
The knucklebone in question is a topic I’ve been well acquainted with for years: numbness of both body and mind, the hazy analgesic whose armor moonlights as a self-same cage. The years it took me to climb out of numbness have also served as a rich field of study into the topic itself.
I am starting to consider that numbness might be much more than the unfortunate and predictable aftermath of a serious breach (or breaches) of the nervous system’s window of tolerance; it may, in fact, be both origin and crux of numerous critical issues, arising at the level of individual and manifesting in horrific ways at the collective and systemic level.
The onset of numbness itself can be sneaky and insidious, its vague nature stretching our ability to name and liberate with language, becoming the very invisibility cloak that allows it to wander and vandalize for years without arousing suspicion. And herein lies the crux: if negative feedback is the key to any self-correcting system, what happens when that feedback system fails to function properly?
What does this mean for the systems we are indoctrinated into that all but guarantee the numbing of heart, body and mind, and what does it mean for those system’s leaders? Indeed, what other series of outcomes could be possible in a world that robs its leaders of the very mechanism required for sustainable and equitable leadership – the ability to feel, empathize and understand the pain of another?
My suspicion is this: that on the other side of our inability to feel (individually and collectively) lies each and every wasteland – each crisis – that threatens the collective ecosystem of the planet. An unusual suspect indeed; how can we create wanted posters for an invisible criminal, one who never leaves fingerprints at the scene of the crime because they are long, long gone?
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- Patti Cobian (author)
- 2024 (year)
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