Everybody remembers the day.
Everybody remembers the moment and the place when it came to them. It wasn’t an instant, but still nobody guessed it would be so quick.
Nobody was following instructions. This wasn’t that kind of thing. In fact, it wasn’t the kind of thing that anybody had ever seen before, although it was exactly the kind of thing, it turned out, that everybody knew. It traveled from one pair of widening eyes to the next, from one slowly lowered coffee cup to another, gently stalling conversations, momentarily furrowing brows and then slowly opening up faces into the first moments of a tentative smile.
It could never have been planned, we all said, we all assumed and still do. It must have begun with a few, a handful, maybe one. Nobody ever said and maybe nobody ever knew. Because we did not know the one or the few we have no choice but to say it was all of us.
What we do know is that on that day we chose love. That seems the simplest description. Or love chose us. And not just a courageous few, that was the thing. Everybody. Everybody all around the whole planet, passing it like virulent transforming wildfire, the most powerful virus that mankind had ever seen, infecting every host completely from soul to hair and moving on so fast that we, all of us, came to know it as The Day.
One single day.
Of course, there was disbelief. Everybody felt it. But the surprise was that we didn’t disbelieve that we had all awoken with each other as neighbours, friends, fellow travellers. Our disbelief was that we had missed years and decades and centuries in the sleep of no rest, the empty oblivion of struggle.
Now we struggle to remember how it was before. We could not have guessed how thoroughly and rapidly the thoughts and ways that kept us so long in pain would vanish.
We know there was lifetimes of fear, fear that nobody could love because of those who made it unsafe, those who had a certain violent power, a certain disposition. We know this was how it was.
Where we had expected an inevitable confrontation, a brave showdown, what took us aback and really threw open the gates of every human heart was the laughter. We all had our own story of watching venom fade in a humble embarrassment of sweetness, outgunned by communion.
We learnt the power of many seeing true.
So we would have to struggle to recall the thoughts of the sleep of unrest, but we know it happened because we are still picking broken glass from the forest floors, still restoring our world to the way we know it is to be from now on, to the way that we always knew it was to be.