Gabriel Cuomo

Link to the mini-piece is in the bio. Or, if you prefer a mobile experience. There’s a link In my story. Enjoy responsiblé.

See you at 6:30 today. (2/17)

(Note: my point is at the end)
I can’t sleep. I keep thinking about how people stress. It’s such a fitting word for the idea. The same one we use to describe carrying potential energy. My restless mind flicks to when I was young. My brother & I would soak branches and wedge them bent. We’d let them dry this way. We would then force them to recurve the opposite way and loop a piece of shoestring to hold the tension. Before you gawk, I was from the suburbs, and 9, so my bows weren’t exactly lethal. They’d usually just snap after a few gleeful launchings of a bent stick parading itself as an arrow. Sad really - never lived up to its potential.

People are a lot like bows under pressure. Yet our psyche’s, souls, beings, grit, whatever you’d like to call them to have no physical qualities (at least mine doesn’t?). We have no laws of physics to determine what will break is, bend us, recurve is into some tool for launching misshaped, misunderstood missiles. We just have an ineffable, sometimes mailable “being” that’s oddly dissenting in its utterance of “you can’t and never could” & “never ever ever ever ever give up”. (I like to think Winston Churchill coaches my superego.)

Without realizing it we simply live in this stress. We accept our dry, unwieldy, and painful position. Then instead of fixing it, we restring ourselves into something more complex and more stressed. (But capable of launching twigs at incredible speeds.) That is -
until we break.

The analogy isn’t well suited by my oddly informed childhood weapon design, because people under pressure don’t always break and instead sometimes come back from that quivering, pent up place with solutions and revolutionary ideas. The truth is we are sometimes aware of our stress. We attempt to tame it. Stress has become our favorite pet.

[Hard Swerve]

I’d like to think this also applies to humanity and the current state of global warming. I think when pushed humans make remarkable strides. So I’m adding my voice to strengthen the draw. It’s time we start using the stress to catalyze some change. If we act like nothing is wrong we will pull without reference and break, but if we can fuel to the metaphorical fire.

For my friends.