I recently asked a friend how school has been this year, and he said the main thing he’s noticed is that the kids are just meaner. It’s true – the kids are not ok – and they’re showing it in all kinds of ways. The thing is, it’s not just the kids. Maybe you heard the story about the guy who wanted Cambozola cheese at the grocery store. He looked all over, couldn’t find it, and asked a worker to look in the back. They couldn’t find the fancy cheese either, and the guy just lost his marbles, crumbling in a very public way.
Granted, we’re not all looking for an imported brand of blue cheese, but we’re not exactly finding what we are looking for these days. In the sage words of the grocery store employee, “I don’t think this is about the cheese.”
This is what we’ve been reduced to in the never-ending COVID saga. (Can we call it “endemic” yet?) We get frustrated because things aren’t as easy as they used to be. It’s a persistent barrage of daily indignities: slower shipping, more expensive groceries, elbow taps instead of hand shakes, inflated personal bubbles, our glasses fogging up. In our schools, students are locked in conflict, having panic attacks in class, and we’re canceling traditions that sustain us. And if we keep waiting for this to end, we might keep being disappointed.
Sometime this past fall, I noticed something though. The paper cuts just keep adding up, but then they keep healing. If you had told me a few years ago what we were about to encounter, I would have predicted varying levels of frustration and sadness. And I’ve certainly experienced my share of both. What I would not have predicted, though, was how resilient we’d be, how the paper cuts themselves would become a symbol of our strength and capacity to cope. At this point in the game, I look back and see not a trail of frustrations, but a trail of frustrations that we’ve overcome. And there’s something empowering in that.
I got a driving violation and fine for breaking a Slovak rule I didn’t know existed. That was irritating for a few hours, but then it melted away as my kids played on the playground. My family needed various hospital visits to deal with various maladies. We literally have three different Slovak health insurance plans, and still ended up in Austria when none of them worked. But here we are, still standing. My son got COVID. Then it was done. I’ve sort of reached this point where I look at life’s barrage and think, “Bring it.”
We’re all enduring more than we ever thought we’d have to endure. But here we are, in 2022, and life keeps happening, and happiness keeps happening, and annoying things keep happening, and in the end, isn’t it all just ok? It makes me realize that there’s a deeper well in all of us, something beyond all the ways that life is harder or more irritating. Something beyond all those extra steps we have to take. Because if we have to take a few extra steps, why not?
Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor who I mentioned in my last post, said, “Everything can be taken from man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” COVID has taken a lot from us, but it can never take away our capacity to choose the attitude with which we encounter life’s challenges. It’s true that there are things we can’t change – terrible, horrible things that COVID has wrought. But that doesn’t have to defeat our spirit. They can be terrible and horrible and not break us.
There’s a grace in this approach – a sort of non-attachment – a recognition of the larger context of coming and going, of the transitory nature of life. We see joy arise, with the recognition that it will fade, accepting it as the fleeting gift that it is. And we see suffering arise, with the recognition that it will fade, accepting it as a part of the cycle. And above it all is our awareness, our mindful presence in the midst of the muddiness of life, laughing as it splatters our face.
This is called equanimity. It doesn’t make a lot of headlines because there’s nothing flashy about it; people aren’t really going to buy a mindfulness app because it promises “evenness of temper.” But in many ways this non-judgmental perspective is at the core of mindfulness, of living in this moment unattached to its implications or reverberations. It just is.
For the past few months, that sense of equanimity has flashed through me at various points. Every time another hurdle pops up in front of me (well, maybe not every time), I am simply reminded of all the other hurdles that have popped up over the past couple of years, and all the times we’ve jumped over them, and keep jumping over them, and I just have to smile a little bit, and think, “We got this.”
If this sounds good to you, here’s a guided practice on equanimity.
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