What We Can Do in the Dark
Forgive me if I seem hyperbolic or overly melodramatic. I’ve distanced myself from regular news and Facebook so when I catch glimpses it all feels very acute and the response is at least a little tailored toward that.
My friends and acquaintances are increasingly comfortable with “apocalypse,” “doomsday,” and “end times.” I’ve several very skeptical friends that provide some foundation to the counter; humans are historically rather good at scraping through and surviving. I think the unfortunate dissonance there is that surviving is a fair step below the thriving we had only a year ago, and many of us didn’t consider ourselves thriving at the time. I know several who only a year ago were convinced they were at their lowest, that the world could not get worse. I know several that have said that for years.
Mindfully, comparisons and expectations of exceedingly complex objects (like the world) are primarily irrational and don’t seem particularly healthy. Even if the world isn’t worse we may well be scraping the bottom of the barrel, transitioning laterally between several awful realities. I’ll keep the update short since I don’t need to be another font of news:
- COVID is still wracking huge populations with death and infections and the threat of long-term health effects.
- Economies seem to be stunningly volatile and perhaps constantly at the risk of implosion.
- The US is amidst a frothy resurgence of it’s long held race-war, perhaps because the system is currently so vulnerable given the COVID crisis.
- The US administration seems to be doing everything it can to ensure that the election in November is at best a farce.
That’s the news as I know it. Oh, and taxes are due next Wednesday.
Early on in the pandemic, I talked a lot about floating in a sea that is roiling. I talked about cultivating healthy habits to mitigate the mundane. I talked about practicing kindness for ourselves against (genuinely) unprecedented crises.
None of that has changed.
The foe we’re facing hasn’t really changed. For a long while, the large majority of the US seems to have functioned as though it is on a track. That the journey is set, and the destination is paradise. We’ve paved our own road toward tomorrow, and we get to sit back and coast to the future.
There are those among us who have been forced to live knowing this as a falsehood.
We’re seeing a shift in the US population; more and more people are recognizing that this idea is and has always been a dire falsehood. The fundamental unease these days is a thrashing against an overwhelmingly loud unknown. As the days stretch out in front of us, we remain uncertain as to how we might survive a year from now, or a month, a week, even tomorrow. Who knows what unforeseen terror lurks on tomorrow’s headlines.
Honestly, maybe we’ll get that Sharknado everyone’s been clamoring about.
The interesting component here is that we do know, intrinsically, that the unknown is possibly also good. Tomorrow the headline could be that they’ve finished a very confident, cheap antibody test for COVID and we can begin testing and more confidently pursuing a real re-opening of the US.
That type of hope can be difficult amongst the fearmongering that happens on the news, and the genuine crises that do seem to unfold at personal, local, and global levels. In fact, that hope is one face of a coin, versed against the fear of tomorrow being severely more grim. Just as love and hate are in fact remarkably similar, hope and fear rely on an anticipation of an unknown. In truth, neither helps us survive in the now, and in the extreme will serve us in hastening our demise.
What we can do is begin to learn the present more and more. Mindfulness is a school of thought constructed to teach us to pull our focus back toward ourselves as we are in the “now”. It’s not perfect, and it’s not something that comes easily. We’ve spent a large chunk of our lives looking toward tomorrow, looking toward others, looking outside for signs of hope or fear. Mindfulness isn’t about selfishly or narcissistically focusing on our glory or flaws. Mindfulness instead focuses on oneself for a few other reasons:
- I am the only thing I can earnestly control. Mindfulness is about keeping my attention on what I can control.
- My emotions are a distorted perception and interpretation of reality around me. Mindfulness is about accepting that distortion and focusing on observables.
- Yesterday has passed and tomorrow is yet to come. Mindfulness reminds me that I can only act in the present.
- My body is a complex, but largely dumb communicator. Mindfulness is about learning my physicality to better understand how it is communicating.
There are deviations of these lessons throughout mindfulness, and being wholly honest mindfulness is not the only school of thought that teaches these ideas. I am most comfortable with the lens of mindfulness. I began learning it years back and have practiced it since. One of the earliest lessons to learn in mindfulness speaks to that idea specifically:
Mindfulness is and can only ever always be a practice.
There’s no end point or mastery. My knowing mindfulness and its lessons does not make me better at the practice. In this way, the idea can be immediately frustrating and earns a bit of skepticism and dismissal.
The unfortunate truth is that mindfulness cannot be mastered because it’s meant to engage the individual in a critical stance against our animal instinct and socially learned behaviors. Every practice in mindfulness is a one-on-one intervention with oneself, and every time there is a new letter that starts, “I love me, but I have hurt myself in the following ways…”
Another unfortunate truth is that I can’t promise that mindfulness is going to “make things better”. My being mindful hasn’t done shit for COVID cases in my area. And as far as “end times” activities go, I can’t tell you that mindfulness is going to make you feel better than eating your feelings.
I see the roil though. I see the unease ripple through my community, my friends, my family.
I can offer mindfulness.
Frankly, it’s a bit of a selfish act that I hope can at least also be selfless. I know I do better when I have obligation to others. I am going to spend some time in the next week figuring out how best to mobilize myself along this axis. It might be a daily “newsletter” with some tips and practices. It might be known availability for Zoom calls to unpack personal struggles. I can hope that my efforts spur a notion that we will survive best together, as a network. Together, we are a more robust organism than as individuals privy to the whims of a wild world.
It sucks that we’re going through this. Our options seem very limited, but among them is exactly a choice to brace together and sustain one another.
I intend to pursue that option, as best I can.
I love you, and I am here.
August
