How to keep living when time stops
The end of 'Management Consciousness'
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It’s 2015.
Staring at the thin blue-grey carpet under my feet as my sister Kate called me from her hospital bed to tell me the doctors found cancer. Stage four.
“I’m going into emergency surgery now.” Her voice was scratchy, sweet, and quiet.
The numbers “20 to 30%,” her chance to survive this, pinged between my ears.
20 to 30. 20 to 30. Like a snippet of a song you hate and don’t understand and can’t forget.
“I love you, I love you.” I think we were both saying this. “Goodbye. I love you.”
I crumpled over, fingertips grazing the carpet, struggling to breathe. I wandered into a colleague’s cubicle — for I was at work in an alternate universe in Manhattan — to mumble, “I have to go now.”
I want to tell you about what the world looked like as I wandered away from the office, and for the first few weeks after that call.
I felt time as I watched strangers go about their day despite the fact that the world had ended.
The subway worker on the overhead speaker called “Fulton Street”, sounding so bored, though the world had ended.
A spilled Coke bottle bled through the subway car, though the world had ended.
A baby in her mother’s arms reached toward a light fixture like it was the sun, though the world had ended.
The finite and cosmic collided, revealing the sheer muchness of this life. Amplified was the texture of every single thing in itself, not my ideas about it. Every face, every object just was. That stranger’s sharp nose across from me. That barking laugh. That pigeon. Indisputably there. My opinions and preferences about them were hilarious jokes. Oh, I thought I could plan my best life now? I’m worried about who did or didn’t text me?? Har har har.
Does this sound bananas? I don’t think I’m alone in experiencing an eerie clarity in the middle of a crisis, when you’re not quite in the world, but you’re exquisitely present to how much lies beyond you.
I call this After Time, because it comes after the belief that we can bargain with reality through good scheduling and worrying.
Which brings me back to that carpet in 2015, and the phone call. My sister survived — wonderfully, improbably — and went on to write about it in Everything Happens for a Reason (and Other Lies I’ve Loved).
I have not, in fact, held on to the clear view of After Time. This perspective is too much to maintain every moment, at least for my level of consciousness. I don’t actually think we are supposed to keep this vast view at every moment, if there is a supposed to.
But, as a gift, After Time showed me how much I lived in Management Consciousness.
Management Consciousness sees the world through the lens of, you guessed it, managing it. Management Consciousness may not believe it can win every battle, but it sure as hell doesn’t want it to lose. It focuses mostly on avoiding problems (because it believes it can).
To do so, it dials the knobs to get just the right amount of every task just right. If that fails? Acquire the right opinions to share.
Work but not too much. Volunteer but hang out with your friends. Rest but don’t be selfish. Management Consciousness fixes! It has plans!
What a beautiful fiction it is to believe the sun rises and sets by our vigilance. It’s so convincing.
You might see where I’m going with this; the polycrisis of our moment sheds harsh light on the Management Consciousness we have been offered. It’s clear to many, many people how fragile the whole setup is.
And if that’s true, then our era might be less a management problem, or even a dogmatic moral problem, and more a spiritual one. A spiritual problem asks us to shift the register of awareness we’re using. Our Management perspective simply doesn’t match the scale or texture of the world anymore, if it ever did.
I’m also talking about identity here, because Management Consciousness is a self we’ve been trained to inhabit. Who are you, if you’re not the one managing reality? What identity becomes possible when you’re no longer cast as the center of control, even private, moral control?
When our identity can’t hold the size of the moment, we end up feeling like we are the problem. The suffering becomes bigger than the painful thing happening; it grows in proportion to mismatch between the consciousness we were trained in and the one the moment actually requires.
After Time offers a glimpse of that other identity, defined by participation instead of mastery. We don’t totally forget the Manager, because we’ll still make appointments and organize the gatherings, but its job description is way smaller. A fuller self, with a cosmically-scaled consciousness, can step in.
And no, this doesn’t make us unresponsive to the moment — if anything, it can make us sharper, clearer, less burdened by shame and distraction. Our full self doesn’t have to assume the universe is waiting for us to get our act together before we can proceed.
We can hear bad news without collapsing into self-blame or believing nothing will happen unless we figure it out this second. We can make consequential decisions without checking with our therapist and five friends. We can feel joy without immediately checking whether we’ve “earned” it.
When we’re not busy managing ourselves (and others) as a project, we can actually relate what’s happening outside our heads. If Management Consciousness runs on vigilance, After Time runs on relationship.
Vigilance is inherently shaming, cutting off relationship, and we hide when we’re ashamed. We lash out and tune out. We assume that everything depends on us individually, our foresight, our discipline, our flawless execution. The moment something unexpected happens (all the time), the story goes I should have prevented this. Being human is a pre-existing breach to overcome.
Relationship, on the other hand, means you’re allowed to (not that you must) respond to what is actually happening as you actually are. Well then.
Life seems perfectly willing to proceed. Perhaps we can proceed with it as if we belong here. Because belonging — and I mean unearnable, unwinnable, bone-deep, cosmic belonging — changes how we act. It steadies the nerves and opens the senses.
Much of what feels like personal failure is really just the strain of trying to meet a vast, living world with a consciousness built for control.
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