I began writing this post some time ago, so I don’t recall where I originally saw the phrase that caught my attention enough to want to say something about it.   The phrase that kept shooting through this tortured head of mine was “when the world is lawless I become aweless.”   I didn’t know that aweless was even a word but when Word didn’t underline it in squiggly red, I may have stumbled on a new one for me.   It’s so transparent a word that I will refrain from looking it up, although my curiosity is really getting to me.   Knowing me as frighteningly well as I do, that will just take me down a rabbit hole I may not escape from until I am forced out by some animal who discovered there were rabbits in the hole with me.   Aweless I suppose means numb, or as they say in my trade, anhedonic (which Word is underlining in squiggly red, although it shouldn’t).  “The inability to feel justifiable pain” was how one of my professors defined neurosis, although in my decades as a psychologist I have extended the definition of neurosis to the inability to feel justifiable anything.

The world we live in today, especially most recently, has become so upside-down that it’s just too much to bear.   I know there is a big part of me that believes that what we are experiencing in the world is no different from the cyclical madness that has plagued the human condition from the moment humans figured out how to communicate with one another.   Things must have gotten significantly worse when “isms” were discovered, an invention that closely resembled the cost-benefit ratio of fire.   Religion undoubtedly complicated things, as did families, clans, and ultimately nations.   Surely culture can be wonderful, adorning life with sweet nuance, but can take a toxic turn should it transform into culturism.   (By the way, Word is telling me there is no such word as culturism.   Multiculturism is a word, but not culturism.  Monoculturism isn’t a word either.   Okay, so let’s coin them both here and now, although I can assure you, we wouldn’t be the first.)

The MAGA madness over the last decade, Hillary’s defeat, and the rise of fascism throughout the world has been hard enough to tolerate.   The conflict in the middle east has always been painful, but the rise of antisemitism, or at least the unwrapping of it, in light of the Israeli response to the Hamas massacre, has hit me on a level that even surprises me.   I was never one to dismiss the prevalence of antisemitism, seeing it repeatedly uncloaked firsthand throughout my life and travels, but watching it demonstrated so powerfully in younger generations is hard to bear.

Despite my lifelong curiosity, I had never had the courage to visit Auschwitz until just a few years ago.   I feared I wouldn’t be able to handle the emotion of it, but one rainy day in Krakow I decided to face that fear.   Afterwards, and throughout, I felt ashamed of myself because of how little I felt.   I was angry that the Polish guide was being watched and clearly censored, and that he was forced to preface statements of how many Jews were murdered with the vast number of Polish resistance fighters who were murdered before the Jews arrived.    But when it came to feeling anywhere near the depth of grief that would have been appropriate for someone who wasn’t so neurotic, I couldn’t go there.   I became inured.   It was just too damn much to handle.   An animal run over by a car by the side of the road can set me off for days, but millions of Jews being shot, gassed and incinerated?   The lifelong grief that resides inside oneself was enough I suppose.   The black and white films that Eisenhower insisted be taken “because the world will forget,” and the stories my mother told me at bedtime prepared me, but the reality on a wet and chilly day and likely any day, was too much.

I saw my response as a cat’s double eyelids.   The external one was open, but the internal one was closed.   That is how I have been feeling lately, about all of it.   The world has become aweless, as nothing makes sense at all.   I used to say in response to the middle east that “it’s complicated.”   It’s not complicated anymore; it’s just too much to bear.   It’s all upside down.   There is no law, no reason.   And so when the world becomes lawless, and nothing seems to make sense, and anhedonia works its way into the soul, the awe that more than any other emotion signals the value of life just fades into oblivion.