A week after the 2016 presidential election, I attended a daylong silent meditation retreat at a local Zen Center in Manhattan. While I wasn’t surprised about the results of the election, I was still horrified by them and found myself in a daze, looking for guidance. During the afternoon teacher interview, my first with this particular teacher, I asked a question I would not have asked a teacher in prior years. “What do I do now?” After using a foul word to describe the would-be president and then profusely apologizing for breaking with the decorum expected of a zen priest, he said “there will be waves of grief.” He also instructed that now would be the time to investigate what is really mine to feel, and what is not my responsibility. This question became the koan over which I would puzzle for the months and years ahead. The waves of grief came through the Me Too movement, through uprisings for Black lives, through the loss of friends and family to online conspiracy culture and through the deaths of hundreds of thousands to the COVID-19 pandemic. As these waves have surged, I have tried not to wall myself off to them. I have attempted to allow myself to listen and to feel what is mine to feel. I have tried, and often failed, not to take on that which belongs to others. And I have left space for grief, knowing that it can connect us. After a decade of Buddhist practice and interest in mutual-aid, I’m not sure I’ve experienced anything that renders our interdependence in such stark terms as this convergence of the pandemic, climate change, and escalating cruelty. We might try to insulate ourselves against this complexity, but it is omnipresent, and we need to navigate it together. As I write these words, the United States is days away from the possible conclusion of what feels like an interminable election season embedded in a chaotic presidential term. The droves of people turning out and waiting hours on lines stretching around blocks and buildings attest to the feeling of urgency surging through bodies, relationships, and communities. Whether you view the images of long lines as a symbol of determination and people power or of the structures of democracy failing to facilitate the will of the public, it’s difficult to ignore that the desire to participate, despite obstacles, is high. Feeling overwhelmed and powerless is traumatizing, whatever the cause. Many people have been suppressing their grief over the pandemic, escalating climate-related disasters, and state violence against Black people as they hold their breath for results that might not be as clear on election night as they usually are. The uncertainty is exhausting at best, and at worst this concoction of helplessness, fear and anticipation is driving people to hopelessness. By the time you are reading this piece, we might be aware of the outcome, but we might still be in a state of agitated suspended animation. Buddhists talk about beginner’s mind – entering each new moment of existence without expectation. I myself have taught about the value of “not knowing” in meditation practice and activism. This particular moment of uncertainty doesn’t feel spacious and freeing; it feels nauseating and impossibly heavy. I see people in my social feeds rallying their network to let go of these negative feelings and visualize victory. I understand the desire to manage our fear and to worry that it will manifest some sort of dystopia, but if I’ve learned anything over the past presidential term, it is that we need to leave space to grieve. Thwarted grief is isolating and in my experience breeds a kind of shame that functions like a gravitational black hole. Pretending this feels anything but nightmarish feels, frankly, unsafe. But acknowledging how I feel isn’t to foreclose on possibility, or lose hope. With an orientation towards the future, those feelings can be fuel. When looking at the connections between spiritual practice and social engagement, there is sometimes a binary of renouncing the world and pulling back into retreat, and going out into the world to engage with it as it is. In reality, most modern practitioners are going to experience both. Sometimes we meditate to build resolve to go out and encounter the world’s problems with compassion and wisdom. Other times we escape into our practice because the world feels like too much. Often, for me, it’s a little bit of both, and my task becomes to bring some awareness to whatever is tugging at me in the moment. What’s important is not forcing myself to have some idealized and pure motivation for practicing, but to show up and stay present with myself a little bit each day, over and over. Developing that kind of relationship with myself has been like building a caring friendship that I can extend not just to myself but to others as well. Day after day, exerting the effort to stick with this practice has helped build a capacity for something I think might be even more important in my life than hope: resolve. Both/and thinking rather than either/or reminds me of the way each eye takes in a different perspective, which combines in our perception to give us a sense of three dimensional space. Resolve feels like a commitment. There is a steadiness in making choices that embody the world I want to live in. There is a steadfastness in moving forward with an eye to the longer timeline, one that extends past my own mortal life, while still giving loving care to the crises and needs that arise in the shorter-term. Both/and thinking rather than either/or reminds me of the way each eye takes in a different perspective, which combines in our perception to give us a sense of three dimensional space. When I am able to consider both the short and the longer term without exclusion of one or the other, life pops out into a fullness I lose sense of when overly-absorbed into deep time or hyper-focused on the immediate. The “too much, too fast” of trauma, where the world feels out of control and a person begins to feel disempowered, leads to disengagement. Our system of government has always been an indirect democracy, and rising tides of corporate personhood and tech-driven voter suppression and disinformation campaigns continue to eat away at the spirit of engagement. As much as we may aspire to make the systems in which we live more just and equitable, we need to acknowledge the very real anti-democratic forces of voter suppression and corporate personhood that impinge on our collective ability to have a say in the distribution of the resources people need, at least as much as we think about how to re-engage people once they’ve turned away from the system entirely. In her book Democracy May Not Exist, But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone, Astra Taylor notes that many of the hierarchies that exist, especially at our jobs, disempower us in such a way that we don’t really encounter democratic processes in our everyday lives. And while disengagement is a rational response, she takes on the task of inspiring us to rise to the occasion to move towards a more direct democracy where people are able to be involved in the decisions that impact their lives in the public and private domain. “Instead of founding fathers let us aspire to be perennial midwives, helping always to deliver democracy anew,” she writes in the final chapter. The present moment is the only one in which I can enact a choice. I can learn from but I can not change past events, and I can dream of and work towards future events but can not always anticipate what choice I would make in those moments. But now is when I can embody a choice I would like to make. Voting is maybe the most popularly elevated of these acts of choice, especially since here in the US, we have a binary two-party system. And this particular election, that either/or choice makes the stakes feel impossibly high. In many ways, they are. You won’t hear me claim that all of this country’s legacies of oppression, harm and environmental destruction, which certainly didn’t start with Trump, will magically end if and when he leaves office. I think, instead, about the intersecting timelines of the long story of what we call America, and the short timeline of what we do now, with this particular chaos, in this particular moment. Voting is not the only choice we can embody. With practice, choosing the steps that bring us closer to a more just and liveable world can become a way of life. And we might even benefit from the reciprocity and connection involved in collective decision-making. That has not been my experience of this election, but I imagine my future self being involved in such a future community. Activist and visionary science-fiction author Walidah Imarisha writes in To Build a Future Without Police and Prisons, We Have to Imagine It First: This is the challenge of true liberatory movements — we critique and fight against what exists, but we take on the responsibility of stretching beyond the now, beyond what we have seen and felt and heard, to root in a shared vision of true liberation. And then we do the work of building that into existence. So, the new koans for me to puzzle over no matter the outcome of the election: where do vision and building intersect for me? Where does deep time and immediate need intersect for me? Where do engagement and retreat intersect for me? Where do I as an individual intersect with my community, and how? And ultimately, what choices flow from these intersections when I am able to listen to them in the present moment and embody them fully? Only you can uncover how these operate with you, made three-dimensional through the perspective of community feedback. Conversation, organizing, sharing, deciding. Only you can uncover how these operate with you, made three-dimensional through the perspective of community feedback. Conversation, organizing, sharing, deciding. In past years I have written about how moved I have been by Rebecca Solnit’s conception of hope as an openness to the unknown and unexpected. In her book Hope in the Dark, which I have read countless times, she chronicles the forgotten stories of liberation that have happened over the long arc of history; of popular uprisings and antidotes to despair. This time around I am finding a lot of solace from Joanna Macy’s work, in which she teaches “when you’re worrying about whether you’re hopeful or hopeless or pessimistic or optimistic, who cares? The main thing is that you’re showing up, that you’re here and that you’re finding ever more capacity to love this world.” There is something freeing in knowing I don’t necessarily have to talk myself out of my dark feelings or come up with a transcendental motivation. I just have to show up anyway, with resolve, to make a choice, over and over again, each choice a decision about what kind of person I want to be in the world, knowing that even if I can not feel it yet, even if I feel cut off from community by the impacts of all of this trauma, there are others doing the same, who have before and who will continue to do so. I worry, is it enough? I don’t know, in the same way that I do not know and will not pretend to know what will happen this week or in the weeks and months to come. I can listen, and I can make the next best choice, without knowing exactly how this choice will shape the future. That in itself could be called hope, or maybe resolve, or showing up. Call it what you want, but know that it is possible.
