Sarah Wilson - This One Wild and Precious Life: A hopeful path forward in a fractured world

The customs queue at Los Angeles International Airport at 5.30am is a lonely place. Flights from Australia often land here at this fractured hour. None of us has had enough sleep. The overhead lights flicker. We smell stale and too-human and our nerves are frayed.

I have come to LA to do some research for this book. We land as the smoggy sky hues orange and in the arrivals hall Im shunted to the long interrogation line. A writer, hey? says the stocky uniformed and armed guy looking at my form when I get to the front of the line. His badge says his name is Jose. What do you write?

Books, I say.

What are you writing right now? Hes flicking through my passport.

Well, the working title is Wake the Fuck Up.

Jose looks up, his eyes widen. As in, wake up to whats going on? Around us... the planet, whats happening to kids?

Yeah, thats it.

Boy, Id read that, he tells me.

Really? I ask, excited. At any given point in the many years it takes me to write a book, I am 98 per cent convinced Im entirely off target. I grasp at glimpses of recognition from people like Jose. I lean in closer over the bench. I think its making us so sad... the climate stuff, the leaders weve voted in, all the consuming, the scrolling on our phones.

Yes, exactly! Jose says.

Do you talk about it with your friends? I ask. Your family?

He winces. Were starting to. Were definitely starting to. But we dont really know how to talk about it.

Jose writes down my name on a scrap of paper and hands back my passport. Ill be looking out for your book, he says and nods his head to dismiss me.

I hear you, Jose. Its hard to talk about something so... nebulous. To talk about something that is so... everything. Something is not right. Were not living life right. To try to grasp such a pain, to find the beginning and end, is like trying to bite your own teeth.

When I started writing this book, I pointed out to my publisher Ingrid that we had a very unorthodox battle on our hands. You realise, I said to her over the phone in a mild panic, no one even has a word for this thing Im going to try to write about. Its a foggy feeling, not a defined phenomenon that we can point at. Its a deep itch that we cant quite get to. Ill have to first convince everyone that the itch is a legit thing before I can come galloping in with some kind of fix. Which is not how books like this tend to go.

For me, this all-encompassing, itchy feeling was in part a state of shock from the constant bludgeoning of global crises and news of the stunningly immoral behaviour of our world leaders. We now receive hourly the kind of highly charged headline that we used to get perhaps a few times a year. We once had time to digest the news, to frame it against the backdrop of the rest of life and talk about it in a measured fashion over water-coolers and dinner tables. Now its a multi-car pileup every time we turn on social media. The leader of the Free World tells his Department of Homeland Security to nuke hurricanes and suggests Americans inject bleach to treat a pandemic; Brits accidentally vote to leave the EU; Australias Deputy Prime Minister blames exploding horse manure for the devastating bushfires that changed a nation; koalas and giraffes face extinction; a revered Hollywood producer is found to have sexually assaulted more than 100 women (and were told most of the industry knew but said zilch for decades); robots are coming for our jobs... and... and how can we possibly emotionally process it all? Its truly stunning stuff.

And so you might call this itch a form of PTSD.

This itch was also a despair that I have strayed from the values that matter to me, mixed with a bewilderment that life was meant to get better not worse. Indeed, we were being told the world was richer, there were fewer wars and less slavery, yet it felt like wed gone backwards. My itch was also a gnawing worry for young people and how they will cope with the planet were leaving them, combined with a cringy guilt that Im complicit, liberally sprinkled with a frustration that no one can answer a question honestly anymore! All of which was polluted with a horrible, and alienating, rage that surfaced when I felt that no one was bloody doing anything! The planet is burning, refugees cry out for our help, the gap between haves and have-nots has become a cruel chasm, and we... yeah, well, we scroll.

And binge-watch.

And buy stuff.

Which makes the itch worse.

I didnt ask Jose about his stance on the climate crisis. (Was he a denier? Did he recycle adequately?) Nor what his politics were. Because it almost doesnt matter anymore. I thought about this as I stood at the baggage claim listening to Cat Power in my headphones, feeling the surreal expansiveness of arriving alone at the beginning of something. We might rage about our differences and troll and blame each other, but deep down we are all feeling the same shock and despair. The same itchy sense that we are so fundamentally off track.

Was there a word we could put to this societal shitstorm? I had to find a better word than itch. I looked around at other peoples faces, downcast and scrolling as they waited for their bags, and I realised that what were all feeling, at the most basic level, is disconnected . Disconnected from what matters, disconnected from life as we thought we were meant to be living it, disconnected from our care and love for it all.