A Prayer for Complexity: Abigail Rose Clarke
Making its way around Instagram Stories today is a poignant and vital message by writer Abigail Rose Clarke, an American author, somatic educator and artist.
In it, Clarke offers what she has subsequently called a ‘prayer’—to that digital higher power known as the ‘algorithm’—to ‘connect [her] with people’ to have the ability to think critically, and the insight to observe the inherent complexity of confounding situations.
The post is now being shared, story to story, by like-minded people.
Her words come as the world is watching the horrors of the Israel-Palestine war unfold, and the Internet is awash with people offering heated, polarised commentary on the conflict.
The post begs the question of what might be gained if people could—instead of overcomplicating or oversimplifying the issue—find a way to hold multiple perspectives in their minds at once. It dares to hope that those people who have felt the most pain and hate might ‘still’ find a way ‘to love the world’.
Where it is audacious but necessary to ask people who are the victims of war to offer this kind of magnanimity and empathy, it is absolutely essential to ask it of people who are not.
The call is to see and acknowledge complexity because it’s a reflection of reality.
We need to observe complexity because it is true.
That is where we start.