I heard these words waft through my kitchen with the resonance of the deep bass notes from the end of the piano. They hung for a moment with great boldness, daring me to wake up from my own internal dissertation. I was intent on a review of a recent conversation. I heard the words, but their meanings dangled alongside like dead fish on a stringer. The sentence slipped nearly unnoticed into my left ear. So engrossed as I was in the one-sided barrage of repetitive thoughts, the intent of the words had to circle back again, and again to get my attention. “The status quo, the status quo…,” The words moved through me, slowly revealing themselves. “Must be maintained…., At any cost…” Someplace deep within began to pulse.

Definitions from Oxford Languages ·

sta·tus quo

/ˌstādəs ˈkwōu. noun the existing state of affairs, especially regarding social or political issues.

“They have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo“

Dictionary.com

I was focused, at this moment, on slicing a small tomato with a newly sharpened knife. There was something familiar about this edict,  I had encountered it before.  Had I been subject to it?  Something in the term began to register deep in my soul. The statement could have passed through with hardly a raised eyebrow, but it did not.  So powerful was the magnetism at the core of my being, without question, I had called it in. If you ask for understanding, understanding will stalk you relentlessly until all past materials filed under that heading are unearthed and expressed.

Having completed my dangerous task with the tomato, my eyes raised to the window. Taking in the techno green grass and over-tended shrubbery soldiers of my neighbor’s professionally groomed yard, I saw it and then felt the concrete weight of it. The flattening, the squashing of our life into someone else’s idea of an acceptable form. Pruning ourselves, our choices, pruning our children into acceptable shapes. Yes, demanding that any living thing “remain the same” is in direct opposition to being ALIVE. Living things change, move, grow, die, get sick, heal, it is all movement. Life is not static. Even the Earth moves when compelled to expand.

For a while, I stood seeking all the places in my life that I had limited my choices to accommodate others, or my own unwillingness to “rock the boat.” By another’s reckoning, this might be virtue, from my position here at the wiser end of life, it smells more like fear, or a severely underestimated potential for an amazing ride through time and space as a human.

And finally, “At any cost” this is the saddest part of all.

This is the silence. The silence of the abused, the silence of the beaten down, the kept quiet, the ignored. The silence of all the unsuccessful keepers of the Status Quo as defined by the majority. Maintaining the status quo; I didn’t discern that it was hard-wired into my nervous system, my family system, and my culture. I didn’t recognize that it had such sharp teeth. I will watch for it now.

May we rise out of our distracted languor and live life as we see fit.