The Future
The key to a long meditation session is to stop thinking about when it will be over. Once you’re doing that — trying to predict how many minutes it’s been or planning what you need to do with the rest of your day — then it becomes the longest most unendurable period of time.
I know that something like this is called for in waiting out quarantine. Obsessing over its end date is not helpful. But unlike meditation, it’s not a safe space, supervised by people we trust and bestowed as free time where nothing is asked of us.
I see people say things on Twitter like, “I think everyone should accept that this is life for the rest of 2020 and figure out a sustainable routine,” but they are almost always tech people with stable and sustainable jobs (and usually without kids). It’s less simple for many others. Whether because they don’t have income and the world will not simply allow them to stay where they are, or they have a business that might be wiped away forever if they don’t act now on the right predictions, or because there are mental health issues that are too long unresolved in them or the people around them, or relationship problems that can’t be ignored any longer, the answer is not always to accept and acquiesce to our surroundings. But how can we do anything else given the uncertainty?
It makes sense to try to forecast and spend time thinking about the future. We’re not cats, unfortunately. We can’t live in an eternal present. We should self-soothe, we should slow our breath if it’s getting too fast, but not always turn away from what distresses us. We have to find a way to approach the topic skillfully, explore it gently, and let it go when needed. Like any work that’s difficult or imaginative, it can’t be forced. We have to get very good at distinguishing between worrying and thinking.
I’m trying to figure out whether my career change is still possible or what it could look like based on which businesses will be allowed to open, in which ways. Personally, I don’t think that the current situation will remain the way it is for the rest of the year, though I also don’t believe we’ll suddenly revert to 2019 life. There will probably be some gray time, enough for people to move apartments or for certain businesses to regain a foothold. I don’t know anything more than anyone else, of course, that’s just what seems reasonable to me.
I’ve noticed that it’s not always helpful to try to talk about the future with others. For the most part, people are telling the stories they need to hear. Sometimes those are overly optimistic because they want so badly for something to be true. Sometimes they’re overly pessimistic because that justifies actions they’ve already taken or fears they’re unable to let go of. I think something interesting about right now is that the experience of COVID-19 is at once astonishingly universal and very very different for each person based on their personal circumstances. Our small worlds are circumscribed by our relationships and jobs and health and wealth, or the lack of those things. It takes a lot of skill to see into someone else’s experience. And that makes it difficult for us to connect right now and sync on our assumptions and predictions.
So somehow we have to absorb all of that, everything we know and don’t, and make our way through the fog of the future. We have to address our own shit, but know it’s not the only shit in the world. We have to keep waiting, but living and planning in the way that human beings do. But maybe we can become just a little bit more like cats. When it’s time to rest, take the longest slowest stretch and find the absolutely most comfortable spot on the couch (you may have to rotate a few times), and practice letting go.
What I’m reading
No Recipe: Cooking as Spiritual Practice, by Edward Espe Brown
You might think it would be better to have more light, to know where you are going, and to get there in a hurry, but Zen is feeling your way along in the dark. When you have plenty of light and know where you are going, then you get impatient and want to push things out of your way. When you are in the dark, you become more careful and sensitive to what is happening around you.
I’ll admit that this is not completely consoling when worry is filling every crevice of my brain and mindfulness is the last thing on my, well, mind. But at other times I’m able to appreciate it. I’m able to look back over my life and notice that the most vivid, intense periods were ones of extreme uncertainty. I’m able to appreciate that there is nothing in my life right now that is on autopilot. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve noticed spring much more closely this year.