Some things are difficult to think about. The difficulty could lie in their complexity. I can’t wrap my brain around quantum mechanics, black holes, or the Electoral College. But other things are simply impossible to think about not because of their complexity but their absolute horribleness. To say something is unthinkable is not to say that you made an attempt and failed. Rather, it is beyond thought’s usual bounds.
All along the sidewalk in parts of the East End of town there are sandbags slumped against white picket fences like pathetic little body bags. Some are ruptured, spilling their sandy guts onto the bricks. I walk by them every day and have mostly given up seeing them or really even thinking about them.
Whereas years ago a sandbag represented a genuine disaster in real time (think Hurricane Katrina), now it is just a subtle part of our everyday existence facing an imminent if slow-motion threat to normality. This is a very minor example of a phenomenon termed “shifting baselines.” Slow and steady incremental changes in our environment are met by the innate animal response of adaptation. We “get used to” things. On the face of it, this is a survival mechanism that has served inhabitants of this planet well over the eons, whatever the changes were.
I recently attended a public meeting of the Cape Cod Commission’s Low-Lying Roads Project, at which local residents were informed of the threats to vulnerable areas in town and the best solutions to safeguard their property. One of the options offered — extremely hypothetically — was to buy up waterfront homes and transform the areas they occupy into the vegetated coastal dunes they had once been, thereby protecting properties landward of them. The response in the room, mostly smirks, chuckles, and skeptical side remarks, represented something of a storm surge of its own.
Some of us will see 20 years from now whether this option is received with the same level of amusement. We are all aware of the changes that are coming: sea-level rise, erosion, increasingly violent weather. But are we really aware? The prospect of our lives and livelihoods disrupted from the Outer Cape’s current playland existence is simply unthinkable.
While climate change has our intermittent attention at the moment, a threat every bit as real that we have lived with and “adapted to” for generations is largely invisible to the average person: nuclear war. While you are thinking that perhaps it is time to get a haircut, trade in that old car, prepare for a friend’s birthday, or tell your supervisor what is really on your mind, nine countries have ready-to-launch nuclear weapons. These include Russia, North Korea, and Pakistan (and the United States, of course, the only country to ever use a nuclear weapon). The possibility of an accidental launch, or a terrorist takeover, or an autocrat’s mental breakdown, could result, in a matter of minutes, in the end of civilization “as we know it.” Still, we go about our daily lives arguing over less consequential issues, trusting our government, composed of mortal beings, to protect us. Nuclear annihilation is simply unthinkable.
And then there is the matter of our own little lives, our personal destinies. I encountered an acquaintance today, someone who had once been a charming and social being, who always had the right word at the right time. Now he has no words and is robbed of his charm and social graces. It is a cruel fate, one I have watched befall more than a handful of people over the last decade. Another more-than-a-handful have gone the way of addiction and overdose. Unthinkable.
And cancer stalks us all. While many cancers are treatable and survivable, plenty are not. I just read Living While Dying: My Cancer Journey by Thom Barrett. Barrett calls himself an “adventurer … a cancer warrior.” Diagnosed with incurable stage IV prostate cancer, he resolves to live life to its fullest in the time he has left. And he is doing just that. Of course, we are all living while dying, we all know we are mortal, but we do not operate on a daily basis with this unthinkable knowledge. It takes what Barrett terms the “existential slap.” Or, as Samuel Johnson famously said, “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”
Confronting the world around us, facing our own finitude, takes courage but yields dividends. When the unthinkable becomes something that must be thought about, a life is defined.
