Cheer up! We're all going to die!

Tonight at the UU Sangha I attend, we started a discussion about fear, and politics, and how to talk about them both. That is to say, our Dharma study was a reading of the Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings, and after we read them one member of the group started to discuss the Ninth one:

Aware that words can create happiness or suffering, we are committed to learning to speak truthfully, lovingly and constructively. We will use only words that inspire joy, confidence and hope as well as promote reconciliation and peace in ourselves and among other people. We will speak and listen in a way that can help ourselves and others to transform suffering and see the way out of difficult situations. We are determined not to say untruthful things for the sake of personal interest or to impress people, nor to utter words that might cause division or hatred. We will protect the happiness and harmony of our Sangha by refraining from speaking about the faults of other persons in their absence and always ask ourselves whether our perceptions are correct. We will speak only with the intention to understand and help transform the situation. We will not spread rumours nor criticise or condemn things of which we are not sure. We will do our best to speak out about situations of injustice, even when doing so may make difficulties for us or threaten our safety.

I'll call this woman Lisa, which is certainly not her real name. Anyway, Lisa said she knows she has trouble with this precept, because whenever she talks about politics (for example) her words never "inspire joy, confidence [or] hope." In fact, her hairdresser recently told her, "You always bring division, antagonism, and negativity with you whenever you come here." [The quote might not be exact.] Then she went on to say that she knows exactly why she talks this way—namely, that she is afraid. Lisa believes the worst about the political currents or possibilities in our country and world today, and she is afraid of all of them. (If you hadn't guessed, she is for example afraid of climate change and Donald Trump.) And this fear causes her to speak in very negative ways.

Then another woman—whom I'll call Liza (also not her real name, but her real name is very close to Lisa's)—said basically the same thing about herself, too. A third member of the group—a man, this time—got us off the theme of politics (thanks be to God!) but expressed a lot of anxiety about how his kids are turning out. His kids are 18 and 21, and only in the last couple of weeks have I started to hear any of the story. Admittedly it sounds grim, but I won't go into it now.

As I listened to all this, I was struggling with whether to say anything of my own. What I wanted to do was to teach, to instruct, to lecture. (You know, the kind of thing I do here so often and so effortlessly.) 

I wanted to say, Yes and you make yourselves miserable by talking the way you do! If you would just stop, you'd feel better! This is exactly why the Mindfulness Trainings tell you to do these things!

Or maybe to say, Try to find one single thing that's actually good about the situation you are so afraid of, and focus on that for a while. There has to be one, because nothing is 100% bad. Use that as a lever or an opening wedge to adjust your whole perspective.

Or maybe to say, You know, Buddhism teaches reincarnation. So just tell yourself that OK, this life has things in it that suck but it's no big deal. Pretty soon we'll all die anyway, and then we get to start over. 

Or maybe even to say, You can't change a damned thing by fretting or fearing. All this stuff is out of your power. The climate is going to do whatever it's going to do; ditto politics; ditto your kids. And Epictetus says that if something is out of your power, it is nothing to you. So just let it go, and "dwell happily in the present moment" (Seventh Training).

In other words, Cheer up! We're all going to die! So there's nothing to worry about in the long run!

Obviously I knew none of that was going to help. Also, the ground rules for our dharma discussions are that you should talk about your own real experiences, not abstract philosophical maxims. And you have to be very careful about commenting on someone else's comments, because you mustn't come across like you are bullying or criticizing them.

But I wanted to say something.

So I began. And slowly, ever so slowly, I began to talk about my time with Wife.

I explained how she would talk herself into depressive spirals that got worse and worse and worse the longer she went on, and that they were frightening because I had no idea what was going to happen next. Would she bottom out? Get worse? Just keep talking, or spring into action? And if she took action, would that mean destroying something precious? Trashing the room? (Both of these actually happened one time or another.) Burning down the house? (Never happened.) Hurting someone? (Depends how you define "hurt.") 

I explained how I would feel despair at these depressive spirals, because they were unpredictable and there was nothing I could do to stop them, but I still felt it was my job to stop them and prevent them. (At that moment I'm sure I heard someone snort. But I was staring at the floor as I spoke, and don't know who it was.)

And I explained how finally, after many years, I began to draw a distinction between Things In My Power, and Things Not In My Power. The first included things like getting the boys out of the way, putting them to bed, and doing everything I could to shield them from the storm. The second included managing Wife's emotions themselves. And when I realized that those things were fundamentally Not In My Power, slowly I began to pull away from them and just to let them be. Like the weather, or traffic.

As I talked, I realized that I thought this was an encouraging message, but someone else might hear it differently. So in the end I guttered out instead of coming to a nice, rounded conclusion. But afterwards, a couple of people approached me about it. The man who was so worried about his kids said he was going to have to think hard about considering their behavior to be like traffic or the weather. Lisa asked me if I had ever worked with Al-Anon, because everything I said about letting go of Things Not In My Power sounded like a core teaching of theirs. Lisa is a retired professor, so I figured it was safe to tell her, "No, I got it from Epictetus." (She laughed.) We all agreed that life is tough as we walked out to our cars.

Often I don't feel like I have anything useful to add to our dharma discussions. Maybe this one was useful.