Appreciating Disturbance

Yesterday I wrote about Trump as the devious one who is disturbing so many of us – both in the world around us and in our own psyches. My friend and colleague James Ford even claims that Trump has somehow rented a room in his mind and is causing trouble there.

From the Process Work perspective (thank you Arny Mindell), anything that appears in the world and in our awareness is necessary in some way. Our true human work is not about trying to control what is happening, but rather to understand and support the deeper wisdom of what is arising.

So when something appears that is disturbing, rather than blaming the disturber or even trying to smooth out the disturbance, we are encouraged to ask “What is it in our world that needs to be disturbed?” “What is it in me that needs to be disturbed?” Buddhist teacher, writer and thinker David Loy asked these same questions in a wonderful and provoking talk he gave on November 22^nd in Boulder, CO:

So how much has the election of Donald Trump shaken us up, and maybe, in the process, is it waking us up in a way that the election of Hillary Clinton would not have done? I am struck by something that the philosopher-provocateur Slavoj !i”ek expressed very succinctly: “The real calamity is the status quo.” In which case, if people are responding, showing their dissatisfaction with the status quo, even if they are doing it for different reasons than I do, is that expression of dissatisfaction what’s needed? Loy Talk

Loy goes on to reflect on how difficult it is for those of us who are so comfortable to wake up to the urgency of our global environmental situation. Most of us agree we are in the middle of a catastrophic change in the capacity of our planet to sustain life as we know it. Ice caps are melting. Species are disappearing. Weather is destabilizing.

But, day-to-day, our lives are pretty comfortable. This morning, I sit in an old plush chair in my warm house. The sky is dark but a lamp lights the room. I drink a cup of fresh tea and tap away at my laptop, reflecting on the political situation of the moment from a comfortable distance. How can those of us who have such privilege understand the urgency of things? How do we overcome fierce power of our relatively comfortable status quo?

I don’t have any good answers to this question.

We human beings actually control so little of what happens in our lives. But we do control, to some degree, where we give our energy and attention. Perhaps we can begin (and continue) to turn our attention more directly to the very real suffering in our world and of our world. The vast majority of the world’s population does not live in the opulent circumstances that many of us do. Though clean water effortlessly comes out of the tap in my house, can I remember this is not so for everyone and may not always be so for me? How can I remember this vividly enough to be disturbed?

It might also serve us well to remember that all of us are in the rather desperate situation of a terminal medical diagnosis. All of us will die in the near future. The status quo will not continue. We will certainly lose everything we have. Whether in one week or one year or eighty years, I guarantee that when death comes to each one of us, it will be too soon.

So in our brief time here on this surprisingly fragile planet, let us allow ourselves to be disturbed enough to come together to take action that expresses both our courage and our compassion.