Embrace the suck
Sunday Missive
"You know how it feels when you're leaning back on a chair, and you lean too far back, and you almost fall over backwards, but then you catch yourself at the last second? I feel like that all the time." - Steven Wright
Add nausea, fear, dread, disbelief, anger, and betrayal, and that begins to describe what this election has served up.
How can we even begin to make a difference when confronted by such monumental problems as the rise of a vile, misogynistic, bigoted fascist-rapist-felon to the highest office in the United States—again? When we face the specter of overwhelming corruption, hate, and power that this election has wrought? Add war, hunger, disease and our global climate crisis, and the danger feels closer than ever. The stakes are astronomical.
Intellectually, I know that, more than ever, there is a need for all of us to constructively and respectfully talk with each other. But in doing the work of being well-informed and struggling to find ways to push truth into massive propaganda machines which feed a steady diet of lies to ignorant automatons who bite, swallow, and regurgitate lies, it is easy to become overwhelmed and numb—after which we must also grapple with the excessive complexity of the issues involved.
Even if we are actively working to effect change through speaking, doing, and giving of our time and resources, there are no quick fixes; meanwhile, we can feel the queasy emotional soup churning inside.
What about the times we want and need to turn down the doom? Wanting to be positive and hopeful, feel encouraged, and seek rest, joy and gratefulness can be cognitively dissonant as well as guilt-inducing. How can we simultaneously hold space for doing, caring, and being?
I wish I knew. There are no easy answers. We are in the aftermath of a collective trauma. So, I went to the shelf and pulled out my copy of When Things Fall Apart, written by Pema Chödrön:
Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for the grief, for misery, for joy.
When things fall apart and we are on the verge of we know not what, the test for each of us is to stay on that brink and not concretize.
Life is a good teacher and a good friend. Things are always in transition, if we could only realize it. Nothing ever sums itself up in the way that we like to dream about. The off-center, in-between state is an ideal situation, a situation in which we don’t get caught and we can open our hearts and minds beyond limit. It’s a very tender, nonaggressive, open-ended state of affairs.
Sticking with that uncertainty, getting the knack of relaxing in the midst of chaos, learning not to panic—this is the spiritual path.
The polite way to say it is: Lean into it.
The Jersey way is: Yo! Embrace the suck!
We never know if a “bad” thing will reap unexpectedly positive results, or if a “good” thing will dissolve into swill.
It becomes possible to hold conflicting emotions, viewpoints, and efforts, while reminding ourselves that nothing lasts forever—good or bad. Change is happening while we’re going through all of this, and so fighting being in this space, trying not to feel this way, is just adding a layer of exhaustion we do not need.
It’s much easier, and very tempting, to cut off and stay angry with all the people whose votes created this sorry state of affairs…because. But it’s one thing to put rancid people in power. It’s quite another thing for them to magically create all the changes they’ve promised.
So, when everything isn’t fixed, all the cracks will start to appear in the fever dream delusion these voters have been living in—and those are the places to stick wedges of truth and start tapping on every one of them.
Thank you for persevering at the Verbihund Café.
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Radical uncertainty. Yes, lean into it for sure. But don't give up the calling out of truth as you see and feel it. As someone once said, "we are not potted plants."
Change...I'm glad to change, but then I catch myself in old habits, after all I'll be 77 next month, so I snap the virtual rubber band around my wrist and ask myself to not-quietly accept and move in a more positive direction.
Sometimes it works.
Thanks for sharing.