I once was fired from a job I thought was going to launch my career. In a two-minute conversation, my plans fell to pieces.
“Life changes in the instant,” Joan Didion writes. Her husband collapsed suddenly, unexpectedly, while she mixed the salad at the dinner table.
In my case, I didn’t let myself be with the panic and uncertainty. I couldn’t. Instead, I felt the need to form a plan, even though the experience should have taught me that plans mean little to the rest of the world. Six months later, I ended up 1,500 miles away in a Master of Fine Arts program in Boca Raton, far removed from humble Kansas to a place where CVS has a wine section and iguanas sun themselves on canal banks.
While the program was one of the most valuable experiences of my life, I wish I hadn’t been so desperate to escape the fear of free-falling, being without a plan. I still experienced all the anxiety and stress of having felt I failed — but because I hadn’t allowed myself to feel it initially, it was just repressed, a small roar in the background I met again when I graduated.
We understand life can change in an instant, and yet we cling to the idea we can predict our days because anything else is terrifying. This inability to accept the limits of our control means, when the plan changes, we can spin out. Like when a pandemic spreads through the world at exponential speeds and your entire life changes. We see how illusory our security is, and we can’t accept it. It’s as though, while crossing a bridge, you finally looked down and envisioned your plummet to the bottom.
What we do with this reality is what Rebecca Solnit writes about in her essay, “On Letting Go of Certainty in a Story That Never Ends.” When the pandemic started, she began recording herself reading fairy tales to bring comfort as we grappled with the change that swirled around us like a hurricane.
The tension in our own lives is similar to the suspense we feel in the middle of the story as the hero nearly drinks from the poisoned cup or as they’re almost gored by the bull.
We don’t know how to accept being in the middle. We’d much rather believe we’re in the ending, the “ever after” that goes on forever, and we would do anything to fast-forward our lives until we get there — just hibernate until the vaccine arrives.
For the first months of 2020, we refused to believe COVID could take hold of our cities as it did Wuhan and Rome. We couldn’t accept that our story would change so quickly, that we would be thrown into so much chaos, that we were not at our safe ending. So we clung to the status quo (some of us still do) until reality forced us to let go.
When that failed, we clung to comforts — television, alcohol, baking (Netflix stock went up, liquor stores made incredible profits, and no one could find yeast) — anything to help us forget how disoriented and stressed we were. Or we repeated the fears again and again like a to-do list, circling them in our minds. We have the same conversation again and again — where the infection numbers are, how odd it was when the world was so quiet.
But in forgetting our anxiety, we forget other valuable pieces of ourselves. And in repeating it on loop, there’s less room for the rest of us — hope, beauty, enjoyment.
As Buddhist monk Pema Chodron cautions, if you try to forget your anxiety (or any uncomfortable emotion, really) or cling to it, you only make yourself suffer. Google searching our anxieties or repeating the same list of stressors again and again doesn’t make the fear go away. Fears are like small animals who, when kept in a box, only cry louder. They want to be seen.
Instead, Chodron says, let yourself be open to it. Give it compassion, attention, and curiosity. Open yourself to feeling vulnerable and unsure. See if you can strip away your longing to feel calm again, certain again, and choose to be with whatever comes up. When you greet that anxiety, it becomes less frightening.
“We keep trying to get away from the fundamental ambiguity of being human, and we can’t,” Chodron writes. “We can’t escape it any more than we can escape change, any more than we can escape death.”
When I did a 10-day Vipassana meditation, I sat in meditation for 10 hours each day with no back support. Eventually, my back began to ache strongly, and I spent much of my meditation time shifting my posture to reduce the pain. When I tried to focus on my breath or other physical sensations, my attention zoomed like a magnet to my back. But eventually, I learned to separate the pain from my reaction — the dislike of the pain, the anger I felt about hurting. The pain itself was only pressure and heat. The rest was my doing.
While we have to accept our circumstances, we also need to understand we have more control than we might think. While it isn’t enough control to live in a world without COVID-19, it is enough to be active and engaged, not resigned, because resignation lets us off the hook for enacting change.
It’s east to pretend the system is inevitable than it is to realize our daily behavior can ripple out and cause chain reactions. Solnit writes deterministic thinking is partly what won the 2016 election. When people thought Clinton’s win was inevitable and Trump’s win impossible, many decided not to vote or to vote for a third-party candidate. We assumed we knew what the future held because to imagine the unexpected seemed impossible. Similarly, unless we’re directly threatened, we can hold the false belief that we have no impact on our world.
Solnit says, “...I ran into this false omniscience again and again, and found that a lot of people liked certainty, even grim certainty, more than the genuine uncertainty of what would happen next. If you pretend the future is preordained, you don’t have to do anything.”
To resist the idea of false omniscience, we need to practice hope. Hope that the status quo won’t continue interminably and then act to ensure it won’t.
We have the same agency in uncertainty as we do in stability. People who have protested for Black Lives Matter have realized their actions can create change, though there are mountains of work left to reverse racist policies of the legal system, education, and housing. But people taking action gives me hope.
Krista Tippet says, “It’s absolutely to bring clear eyes to what in the world must be better, and to be present to the world and its frailty and its suffering, but also...to wake up every morning and say, ‘Yes, yes. That is true. I am present. I see it. I care’ — and to see that generative part of the story that you can be part of.”
To acknowledge you have little grasp of what will happen next: That’s beginner’s mind. It’s being open to the fact that our universe is random and chaotic. It’s to hope for new realities and begin to enact them. As an example, Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech was unscripted. He was relaying a scripted speech when Mathalia Jackson called from the crowd, “Tell them about the dream!”
We assume we have less agency than we do, or we point it at the wrong things — vanishing discomfort, trying to change what we cannot instead of changing what we can because the task seems too much of a bother. It’s what keeps us from engaging in uncomfortable conversations, both political and personal — asking our family members the questions that matter in favor of familiar small talk. We want to be comfortable, so we invent a reality in which our actions cannot create change. And in uncertainty, we can so desperately want to have calm that we will do whatever we feel we need to get it.
But clinging to familiarity, Solnit continues, is like bellyfloping on flotsam instead of swimming. The heroes of fairy tales are ones who take their fates into their own hands, leave a familiar home, take risks, make allies, outwit and invent.
She says, “We are in the ocean and time is fluid and the waves will keep coming and there is a distinct possibility that this is okay.”