Spoiler Warning: This essay will talk about Silo Season 2 Episode 9. If you’re not caught up, get caught up, then come back and read. :)
We forgot to notice, somewhere along the way. We were distracted from it, shiny new popups on shiny new devices, little dopamine triggers that scratch an itch we never knew we had, that create new itches just to convince you those too need scratching.
We were lied to about it, convinced by cynics that everything is shit and broken and beyond repair and should be binned and forgotten, that those who think otherwise are bound for rooms of padded white walls, that they are of simple minds with naive thoughts.
Mostly, we forgot to notice, the why matters not at all, it happened and we’ve somehow become blind to a truth that truly is simple:
Life is magic, and we are surrounded by reminders of this fact.
A week or so ago, Sarah and I finally got around to finally watching the outstanding second season of a show we both really enjoyed in its first, Silo on AppleTV. We enjoyed it so much, I actually read the book trilogy, and found it just as fun, with a lot more detail.
At any rate, the second season was particularly fascinating to us because we were finally given some answers to a lot of questions, but it was something else that stuck out to me. It was a single scene stuffed into a giant episode with a lot of exposition, a lot of action, and a lot of storytelling. A single scene that probably lasted only a minute or two, but it slapped me in the mouth of my heart (I understand that doesn’t make any sense, but it does to me).
In the scene, one of the characters finally breaks a protocol he believed he was given years and years ago, the single directive he’d based his entire life on after his father was killed in the process of delivering it.
He opened the door he was told to never open (to keep himself safe, only) and he let people into the vault that had been his home for decades. Alone. Miles below the earth’s surface in a strange military grade silo (hence the show’s title) with over one hundred floors and that once housed 10,000 people. I won’t get into all the details of how everything came to be, but basically the vault was home to “relics”—essentially artifacts from humanity that had been saved after some apocalyptic nuclear event on the surface.
Books, toys, maps, chemistry sets, cards, magazines, televisions, yo-yos, and hundreds of items that are completely ordinary and mundane to us, here, now.
All these items, dust-covered and stale after years of sitting idle, commonplace in our eyes, were spectacles of absolute and complete wonder for the characters in the show, the characters that had never seen the outside world, never seen a book, a toy, anything other than the completely curated and sterile environment of their silo.
The music that accompanied their discoveries clearly made the emotions swell, but there was just such a stunning simplicity to their wonder, that it made me ache in a deep and fundamental way. I talk a lot about finding the miracles in the mundane on this Signal Fire, hell, I wrote a book about it, and this little scene in this (not so little) show absolutely summed it up and demonstrated it with a clarity I’ve dreamed of. Everything I am doing here, whether you’ve caught on and noticed or not, is this collective gentle push forward in the smalls of your back (the small of your backs?) and it’s a reminder that there is a great big beautiful world right in front of your noses, if only you slow down and allow yourself to see it.
The pace at which our technologies have advanced, the alarming rate of our innovations, the overwhelming disconnectedness, have all contributed to a culture I think we’ve seen emerging over the last few decades. We forget to marvel at the things we’ve made, we forget to hold the trinkets and tchotchkes, the toys, the now defunct technologies, and truly feel spellbound for their power and ingenuity. We’re surrounded by millions of objects made by our human minds that mostly end up in landfills instead of museums, recycling bins instead of carefully locked vaults, half a mile below the earth’s surface in some secret silo.
We’re sharing this place with a million animals that one day won’t be here any longer. We’re breathing the same air as elephants and dolphins, grizzly bears and scorpions, we’re walking around at the same time as lions, as tigers, as koala bears and panda bears and pet dogs and asshole cats and we can see mice scurry and owls soundlessly fly and fish leap to catch flies we don’t know the names of.
We can listen to music, instantly, songs written a century ago, Monster Mash at full volume, we can hear sonatas and operas and rap and country and yes, even jazz.
Everything is magic. Everything.
What if we practiced seeing it from another perspective? What if we looked at it with fresh eyes, though they feel so old?
We can, and I know this. We can appreciate more than we convince ourselves we need, we can reflect more than ignore. We can slow down, even though everything told to you by everyone is that you must not. Hustle, say they, turn it all into something bigger, keep moving, you’ll sleep when you’re dead, blah blah blah side hustle culture blah. What if we just didn’t?
What if we didn’t have to upgrade to the latest micro-updated mobile phone? What if we didn’t waste 5 hours a day staring at an algorithmically created artificially intelligenced social media cesspool? What if we kept what we bought, took care of it, treasured it as though it was an artifact that one day, some lonely survivor might stumble upon and feel nothing but awe for?
My favorite quote from my favorite movie, Joe vs. the Volcano, says it better than I can:
My father says that almost the whole world is asleep. Everybody you know. Everybody you see. Everybody you talk to. He says that only a few people are awake and they live in a state of constant total amazement.
Stick around here, participate in the Kindling series that comes out every Tuesday, and truly give yourself over to the reboot that I’m guiding you through over the next year, and I think some of this wonder will come back naturally. IF you’re not part of that group, I strongly urge you to join us, it’s less than a Starbucks order a month and it’s way, way cheaper than therapy.
I have this hope that’s mixed with this nagging suspicion that we’re just done with feeling the way we’ve been feeling for so long. We’re done feeling so distracted, so disconnected, so overwhelmed by the paralyzation of the proliferation of our choices, the analysis that caused the paralysis in the first place. It’s too much, too often, and we’re too far away from ourselves, from the wonder that we were born with but then let float away while our thumbs scrolled some meaningless mobile game.
We want a return, I think. We want a return to how we once felt, the wide-eyed wonder and wanderlust that made the whole world feel magic.
I’m just here to tell you we can have it, we can carve it out of this busy, spinning, overwhelming place. We can feel how we felt, only more. I promise we can.
Follow me. I’m showing you how.
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