Hi Misters,I’m back in Georgia, the home of my adolescence, and I’ve been thinking a lot about remembrance. In many religions, remembrance is a core tenet. You remember God through acts of worship and belief, and God remembers you through His mercy and provisions. I’ve been returning to remembrance as something that shapes all of our relationships. When you remember someone—their mortality, their struggles, the fact that they were once just a babbling child—you step out of yourself and into your shared animality with another. You unself. Naomi Klein explores the concept of unselfing, in Doppelgaenger: A trip to the Mirror World. Drawing from philosopher Iris Murdoch, she describes it as the process of moving beyond self-obsession in order to engage more deeply with the world and others. For Klein, unselfing isn’t about losing oneself, but about finding freedom from the self. By doing so, we can better see beauty and hope, cooperate with others, and work toward a better world for future generations. Unselfing isn’t vanishing. It’s being porous—a way of letting the world in. Not sacrifice, but a shift: from orbit to gravity. Not only in crisis or closeness, but in the slow and daily ways. In many ways, this is where love lives: in the ten dollars you spare a stranger on a cold night, in accepting help from those who remember you, in remembering each other and returning to one another through cycles of grief and abundance. Know that I’m actively remembering each of you right now, and I am eternally grateful for the love we’ve built in this community. With peace,
Fatima Swaray
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