Resisting the seductive power of despair: The pitfall of taking things personally

It is only four in the morning, but I am awake, blisteringly awake, fan whirring, dog snoring. A wave of something rises up in me—something gelatinous and dark—and I feel my ego-mind scratching at the door that has kept it at bay during my nearly six hours of unconsciousness. It is restless. It is hungry. It is eager to attack or to play. Whatever its particular desires right now, it wants out. It is desperate to reassert its sharp, shrill place in the peaceful field of awareness that I know—much of the time—is who I really am. Each night, if I am fortunate, it agrees to lie down in its kennel. We have a bargain, we two, after years of uneasy battle. It will come to heel, and even stay put for a while, permitting me to sleep, meditate, or walk through the woods or along the beach. But sometimes our detente breaks down, and on pre-dawn morning like this one, it rears up boldly: “Despair, despair,” it growls. “All is lost. There is no hope. Nothing can be done to fix this mess.” At trembly times like now—as I too have felt gutted by what’s in the news—I hear its doom-and-gloom voice not as a warning but as a temptation. Like the delicious desire to fall asleep in a snowbank on a sub-zero day, or that giddy moment on a suspension bridge when you can almost taste the sweet, empty oblivion of leaping. “How easy it would be, how very easy,” the mind whispers…..

But although it is only four in the morning and the thoughts press in, coiling around me like rope, something in me rebels. And so I find the wherewithal to push away the promise my ego-mind holds out to me like an opium pipe. I will not give myself over to it today, to its narrow interpretation of what is possible or who I must be. Not today. Haven’t I learned repeatedly that it is not to be trusted? That in any given situation, it will focus on what will go wrong, on how I will mess it up, on how there is no point, not really, for are we not all doomed to die in any case? If not in the self-immolation of climate change then from a madman’s megalomania or an asteroid? Is this not the same voice that has tried to persuade me at various points all along my life path that there’s no point in going to work or the gym, or even of making the bed or brushing my teeth? “What does it matter?” it whispers. “Why bother? Go back to sleep. Have another drink. Watch another movie. Go ahead, slip back under the icy surface of the pond and let go.” I know from experience that it would be so easy, so very easy to agree to a half-dead numbness to avoid the discomfort that comes with aliveness. To fall into a half-sleep that smoothes out the edges of the objects I must make my way around, the situations I must negotiate, the sadness, disappointment, and grief that inevitably comes banging at the door of my human house.

If we we are relatively privileged and things are going pretty well for us, then it’s not hard to rely on our spiritual practice to help us let go of our worries and struggles. It’s no accident that we probably feel most “spiritually evolved” when we are healthy, safe, have enough money, feel more or less loved, and live in a stable social and political environment. But when the medical diagnosis appears, the house burns down, or we can feel fascism licking at our heels, it can be so much harder. Then many of us are like my puppy whose practiced ability to sit and stay quickly evaporates when worldly challenges arise, a squirrel, the mailman, a child on a bike. And it’s when I most need my little dog to remain self-possessed, to remember his skills—both for his safety and my sanity—that he’s most likely to lose his shit. Just so, many of us can keep it together on the meditation cushion or in the serenity of a kayak on a still lake but become reactive as hell when the world asserts itself. In the aftermath of such breakdowns, it can be helpful to remember that most of our practices and disciplines are undertaken precisely with such acutely difficult times in mind. Few of us lift weights just so we can return to lift weights again and again, but to develop strength to propel us through the vicissitudes of life and time. Nor do we go to therapy to become better at being therapized. So too, we do not sit and meditate in order to become master meditators but in order to better access our true nature, to make it less likely that we will lose ourselves in illusion and the inevitable suffering that creates.

All I’m really trying to say is that we were made for difficulty. That it is not an existential aberration or a mistake that, as embodied, temperamental creatures, we experience bodies that degrade and dissolve or that others—both individually and en masse—will make us weep from the stupidity and shortsightedness of their choices. We are here for this. And once we stop thinking of life challenges as a rip off or as a colossal error, then we can actually focus on responding to them in more or less skillful ways. When we are caught up in this-shouldn’t-be-happening thinking—when it is, quite evidently, HAPPENING—we cannot constructively focus on addressing what is now at hand. And when we get caught up in this-should-not-be-happening-to-ME thinking, we risk becoming seduced by a disempowering victim consciousness that is a hallmark of the ego-mind. The upside is that this is also when we might best uncover our hidden assumptions. If I now feel shock and disillusionment about the national situation, does this not suggest that I had believed it should and would be otherwise? Why, despite all the evidence of its ubiquity across time and place, do I feel almost personally affronted that so many people in “my” time and place are behaving in ways that are cult-like, cruel, and nutty? How much of my current attraction to despair is rooted in my naive, arrogant assumptions, first, that whatever is happening is happening to ME, and, two, that it should not be happening? Is it possible that, deep down, I somehow imagined that, if I played earnestly and by the rules—if I were a “good person”—then my individual (and collective) life would get progressively better?

What I am pointing to here is, yet again, the importance of acceptance, but, again, one that has nothing to do with resignation. I am myself a warrior for causes and people I believe in, and I believe—as do the majority of folks—that fascism is a scourge. This is, rather, a kind of acceptance that simply nudges us away from the self-pity that can dog good people in times like these. And even if it is understandable that we are inclined to take it personally when others behave stupidly and from ignorance—especially when that behavior directly impacts us—remaining in an obsessive space of personal woundedness is an indulgence that the ego-mind will exploit. It will have us so rooted in righteous indignation and pseudo-ethical defensiveness that we will become clumsy and cloudy. It’s when the mother of the kid discovered shoplifting becomes so focused on the damage to her own self-concept as a good mother she can barely see the child. It’s the person with cancer who remains so obsessed with the unfairness of it all that he cannot properly assess his treatment options. It’s the woman who’s been divorced for years whose primary identity is still so caught up in being betrayed that no one can stand to be around her except for those eager to swap victim stories. All this to say that outrage and indignation are normal—probably even developmentally necessary from a psychological point of view—but when we get stuck there we’re basically on repeat, reopening our wounds as we obsessively lick them. Until such feelings transmute into something less personal, we can’t be as skillful as we are capable of being, or as clearheaded as this moment in history desperately needs us to be.

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