In Lifehouse, Adam Greenfield writes:

Stability will be the fundamental value proposition of a certain kind of politics in our time of undoing, and we need to reckon with just how seductive it will prove to be for too many of our neighbors in the global North. For them, the overriding instinct will be to press on, to avoid confronting any of the increasingly blatant asymmetries of access to care that characterize our world, just so long as someone promises to preserve the rudiments of a comfortingly familiar way of life. And they may even succeed at securing some measure of continuity for themselves—but only by shedding increased turbulence and suffering onto others, as if to say: there’s only room enough for us on this lifeboat.

Greenfield, Lifehouse, page 208

I often listen to people as they talk about their desire for stability—a desire that is often especially acute after some crisis or another. And I’ve come to notice a couple of ways in which “stability” tends to do work in those moments: one is as a kind of nostalgia, a longing for things to return to some point in the past. The other is the work of grief. Often, the nostalgia is corrosive: it encourages us to pine for something we can never have, and so drains us of the energy to act in the present. The grief, however, brings us forward. It hurts, of course—often terrifically so. But by accepting it, we escape the past, become aware of the present, and can start to imagine and build the future. I suspect that breaking free of the seduction of stability, as Greenfield correctly puts it, requires strengthening those muscles of grief, learning how to accept grief as an inevitable and generative part of our lives, rather than a thing to be avoided at all costs.