Dissolution/dis-illusion?

The third of a short (?) series on the EU Referendum

Friday (after the ‘leave’ vote) I felt I was living in a different world.  The same feeling as the the day after my second parent died.  I had been born into a world where my parents, family, immediate environment were givens.  Like familiar stars in the firmament.  And now the stars had shifted.  I did not know how to orient myself in this new world.

Just as I had been born into a world where the NHS and universal education were givens, Britain’s EU membership had been a backdrop to my whole adult life.  I took it for granted, knew little about it, had no personal objections to it, no negative experiences.  I had gone to work abroad just at the time of the previous referendum confirming our membership.  So  its establishment had passed me by.  It simply became a fact of British life whilst I was otherwise engaged.  It felt like a good thing.

Now that it was gone, separation threatened, I felt the loss of some kind of feeling of a benign, or at least well-intentioned, presence.  That somewhere people were grappling with the bigger picture, looking out for our interests in a world of complexity that I could not even begin to imagine.  I did not envy them their task.  The decision to leave felt like the loss of a good thing.  A loss that shook me to my core.  

All day I felt alternating fear, anger, despair and helplessness, a sense of defeat.  My first panicked thoughts: there is going to be such a lot of economic/political disruption for the rest of my life.  Bad things will happen.  Fear and uncertainty.  I can’t see how this can lead to anything other than uncertainty/recession/depression - feeling alone, isolated, vulnerable, unprotected, disconnected.

Frightening to be confronted with just how much fear and anger lies beneath the surface of everything and everyone.  I felt like I was on the side of the educated, liberal, privileged and that the stupid, narrow-minded thugs, the heartless brutes had taken over/will run the country, determine its feel.  All this seething discontent was here all along, a current barely beneath the surface of everyday life.  Crying with shock and sadness that this could be so.

NONE OF THIS IS TRUE - it’s just what I feel, what I fear, what I imagine.

NONE of us know what will happen.  Right now this does not feel good.  But it was somehow relieving to recognise the truth of it.

I deepen in PRACTICE, sitting and sensing to stabilise my panic reactions.  I am so glad I have joint Skype inquiries scheduled for Saturday and Sunday, the upsurge of emotion is constant, near overwhelming.  Meanwhile I continued to inquire into my ongoing experience.

This was the day that I knew that no-one knew anything.  
We were all just whistling in the dark.