Anxious Together

Amazingly, our President’s approval ratings are going up. The daily Covid-19 update press conferences that are supposed to keep us informed appear to be just another opportunity for him to tell us how well he is doing and to share his gut feelings—feelings that often are at odds with the realities expressed by his own top medical advisors. His incapacity to deal facts on the ground that are beyond his control seems to be preventing him from leading the country to unite to face this frightening time together.

Though I try to be empathetic and understand the many different ways human beings construct the world, I have a hard time understanding how people can still be supporting him. I can easily spiral down into anger and resentment about ‘those people’. And I assume that ‘those people’ see me the same way—in the mirror of blame and othering. From these entrenched positions, rational arguments and reasoned discussions have little hope of creating any common ground. How can we find even a sliver of ground to stand on together when the stakes are so high? It’s not a matter of just saying everything is relative, but of acknowledging the polarities that are a fact on the ground and finding some way forward.

Yesterday I realized that one thing almost all of us share, though we might speak of it differently, is our fear and anxiety in this time of the pandemic. People around us are getting sick and dying. Maybe even we have become sick with the virus. The economy is grinding to a halt. Many of us are out of work or our work is radically changed. None of us can do what we used to do. It’s not clear when we will be able to leave our houses and resume our ‘normal’ lives.

Of course we can argue about how long and how dangerous, but the partisan denial has mostly fallen away in the face of this frighteningly powerful reality. None of us can go on with the comfortable delusion that we are in charge of our lives. We are all entering a time when everything is different. (Of course this is true every moment of our lives, but sometimes it is so glaringly obvious that we can’t pretend otherwise.)

We all experience fear and anxiety in different ways and each one of us has many different ways to meet fear and anxiety. All these different ways have their own benefits and drawbacks. No one way is the truth. So I would advise us all to keep cycling through these many possibilities.

We can turn away. We can turn toward. We can distract ourselves. We can try to fix it. We can try to understand the root causes of our fear and work on them. We can turn to God and pray. We can feel overcome by emotions. We can meditate.  We can go into despair and darkness. We can be curious about these feelings. We can give up. We can accept. We can do nothing.

These are all fine and human ways to meet fear and anxiety. I would recommend that you try a wide range – perhaps even see if you can expand your repertoire of responses. And know that this uncomfortable experience is not what separates us, but what joins us with every human being in this country and around the world.