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Posted by james on Dec. 10, 2000

<ul><i> "Face it guys, things are just dead all over."
"You mean, you with they was."
? ? ? ? -Vultures from the Jungle Book
</i></ul>
There are two interesting things about what's going on right now. One is the way we're all just dead right now. The second is how it's mirrored not only on a personal level, but also in the group as a whole.

There's so many things happening this semester, from the things I see happening in people's lives and the stories I hear, down to events in my personal life. This semester has been a season of change. Things are just qualitatively different this semester. There have been a lot of hard times for people, and some exciting moments. And through it all, we seem to be dealing with the issues we each have. And in the midst of our dealing, we tend to retreat from others. Certain things are left at the surface; small friendly interactions, events that you attend, keeping close to a few friends. But the energy that you normally spend reaching out and growing now seems to be spent holding yourself together and helping yourself cope and recover. In this way, we feel a little (or a lot) dead to the outside world

The same thing happens to the group. We don't have as much energy to reach out, so we spend it individually in small quantities on small groups, in places that are comfortable for us. And the bonds that aren't as easy to keep up we put on hold until we can deal with these external things. This makes the group fragment and lose vision and unity. And this is what makes the group dead to the outside world, and also to itself

At some point you realize, even as your head is burried under your own problems, that this is going on around you. And at some point we all realize, when the subtlety ceases to hide what we've felt all this time; that something's wrong, we're all sick. The next step after we've named the sickness is to find out what to do about it. And this is where we're stuck. What do you do about apathy, loss of energy, individual problems? What can jolt us out of our own problems and into real interactions with each other, and not survival tactics

Hopefully, we'll know that answer in a few months from experience.