Feeling Less Than Inspired

The clock ticks. I close my eyes. A small headache and slight nausea. Not terrible, but not pleasant. I feel unmotivated and unclear. Nothing comes to mind as I sit with laptop open to write. An inner dialogue of complaint and worry natters on just beneath the surface: “I don’t like feeling like this. This might be something serious, why can’t I just feel fine? Maybe I should just go back to bed.  I feel crappy.”

How do we find our way through the times when we feel less than stellar? When we lose our energy? When we lose our connection to what inspires us? Sometimes its quite clear what needs to be done—what needs to be said and I excitedly follow along. (A good friend has, on more than one occasion, accused me of being like a golden retriever puppy. The first time they said this, I was upset and offended with the indignity of the image, but over the years I have come to realize the truth and the gift of this kind of presentation of life.)

Other times, like right now, I feel lost and uncertain. They physical discomfort is not as troubling as the loss of purpose and direction. Many decades ago, I remember going through a long period of this kind of darkness. At the time I came across the words of Meister Eckhart, the medieval Christian mystic who spoke directly to my situation:

To be sure, our mental processes often go wrong, so that we imagine God to have gone away. What should be done then? Do exactly what you would do if you felt most secure. Learn to behave thus even in deepest distress and keep yourself that way in any and every estate of life. I can give you no better advice than to find God where you lost him.

As I read this again for the first time so many years later I am struck by two things. Firstly, that in order to write about this, Meister Eckhart himself must have experienced this. He may be speaking to seekers who have come to him for solace, but in his writing I feel an authority and appreciation that only comes with experience. He writes of the times when we are ‘in the deepest distress.’ So even this great exemplar of the holy life whose many words and teachings have come down through the ages—even the famous Meister Eckhart traveled these dark roads.

I find great comfort in knowing I am not alone. Though I am sometimes embarrassed to write again and again about the dark regions and the struggles that are part of my life, they are real and true even as they are ephemeral and not what they seem. I share these experiences too out of my commitment to present life as it is rather than life as I think it should be or life as someone else has said it is. Some have reported back that it is in reading about my struggles that they too have felt comfort in knowing they are not alone.

The other teaching I get from this brief passage is the advice ‘to find God where you lost him.’

(Side note for Buddhists, Atheists, non-Judeo-Christians and others who struggle with ‘God’: please replace ‘God’ with whatever term is filled with mystery and points to something beyond that is source of us all. A few of my favorite other place-holders for the mysterious sacred are: Life, the Tao, the Dharma, Aliveness, the Universe, the Heart of Hearts, the True Way. But for the sake of ease in writing I will simply join with Meister Eckhart’s convention and to use the word ‘God’ to point to what cannot be truly spoken.)

So, in this moment, I feel as if I have lost God—lost my way. Meister Eckhart is clear to mention that this feeling of abandonment is not because we have been abandoned by life, by God but rather because our ‘mental processes’ have gone wrong. I believe this is what is known in the 12-step programs as ‘stinkin’ thinkin’’ – the unreliability of our cognitive processes to lead the way.

To ‘find God where you lost him’ is an encouragement to stay right where we are—right in the middle of darkness or despair or even in the middle of slight headache and nausea. There is no need to run off somewhere else—no need to try to feel better or even to change to a better frame of mind. This is an affirmation of the sacredness of every place. Moods and states of health come and go, but what is most essential, the presence of God, the availability of life itself is always here.

Meister Eckhart also said: ‘Expect God equally in all things.’ And as I put it many years ago and now use as the inspiring quote beneath my signature on email: ‘What we long for is always present, hiding in plain sight.’

So here I am—still feeling kind of crappy. Apparently, the teaching for today is that everything else (whatever we call it) is also here with me (and you.) My advice for us all is to do nothing. Maybe if we slow down enough we can allow ourselves to be found once again by that which has never left.

White Lumps Where the Cars Once Were

The cars in the parking lot across the street are covered in snow. Under the streetlights they glisten white like weird and ghostly boulders. Each lump belongs to someone. And each of those someones had a mother and a father and through sheer innate brilliance of body and mind learned to walk, talk and make their way through this human world. Later on this morning, many of these someones will come out and brush their pile of oddly shaped snow fully expecting to find the car that was there last night. Due to laws of inertia, the special properties of water and the speed with which the earth is spinning as it hurtles around our nearest star which we call ‘the sun’, their car will most likely be there—intact and cold.

I marvel at the many lives around me. Though most of them are sleeping, I’m remembering on this dark white morning that they are not just extras in the feature film of my life. Of course they are that too—each one occupies some small space in the world of my mind. The worlds we human beings live in aren’t exactly imaginary, but everything we see and touch and sense and imagine requires our creative participation.

The light from the streetlight bounces off the snow particles resting on each other and on the car. Some of those particles of light (which are also somehow waves) strike and reflect at just the right angle to make their way into my eye where rods and cones are waiting to receive and acknowledge them. (note to self: The angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection – might this mean that what I say about you is equally in some way about me?) It hardly seems there could be enough room for rods and cones in my eyes, but for the moment, I’ll set aside that objection. These supposed rods and cones are quite excited to receive the particles which are also waves. (second note to self: Don’t stop and try to figure everything out or you’ll never get anywhere.) These scores of rods and cones have been designed for just this moment and in their particular white excitement they dance and wiggle and generally have a great time. They are touched and immediately respond by sending tiny bursts of energy along pathways into the dark regions of the brain. The brain which is enclosed in an opaque bony case covered with skin and bathed in a constant flow of blood. In the enclosed and mysterious brain there is no light and no snow, no cars and no someones. But somehow the brain awakens and reflexively responds to create an image of something that is ‘out there’—in this case, white weirdly shaped mounds of snow.

Now this ‘out there’ is what I am designed to dance with. Without ‘out there’ there is no ‘in here’, no me, no perception, no reason, no mounds of snow. But likewise, ‘out there’ is no thing until we meet and touch each other in a thousand unlikely ways. Over the years and through intense early training (thank you Mom and Dad), I have learned to trust the excitements of my eye and even developed a short-hand explanation for the invisibly meshed business of eye and mind and world. I say: ‘I see….’ then go on to fill in some word (filled with a lifetime of meanings and associations) for whatever it is that is reflecting light into my eye and beginning the whole affair once again.

And the whole business of receiving, organizing, associating and naming goes on in the shortest flash of time and is utterly imperceptible to me. Seeing is one of the many processes through which I construct my world and my life in my world without being able to directly experience the creative interchange that is happening. We are all in the construction business but based on the evidence of our experience, we avow innocence. As David Bohm says ‘The mind creates the world, then say ‘I didn’t do it.’

But back to the cold white shapes of snow across the street and to dreaming of other human beings – of other seers and thinkers and imaginers who are now lying in bed or perhaps just waking up to groggily wander toward the bathroom. Each one lives in their own world—the world that touches them—the world that each effortlessly participates in creating.

There are no bit players. Each of us is a swirling universe of sensation and meaning—of hope and fear—of light and dark. Each of us, as Whitman said, contains multitudes and perfectly reflects everything that came before, is here now and will happen.

Perhaps today I can more deeply appreciate the wonder of each other one who crosses my path, brushing snow off their car and driving their separate and intertwined universes to work or to shop or maybe out to the snowy woods for a lovely winter walk.

The Skill of Staying

Unskillfulness, conflict and difficulty are necessary and unavoidable parts of life. The desire to be pure and good and nice can often lead us into realms of isolation and rigidity that diminish our lives beneath a façade of religious and social righteousness. Real life is messy, emergent and participatory—not to mention fun, fascinating and terrifying!

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about relationships the past week as I explore how we might be able to heal some of the deep divides in our country that have been so evident over the past four years. How do we initiate and maintain genuine relationships with people who we see as very different from us? Of course, when we look closely or when we live with another person for any length of time, we often discover that every other human being is very different from us.

One of the primary skills for authentic relationship that I’ve noticed is capacity to stay, even when it gets difficult. Staying does not mean just staying physically, but finding a way to stay engaged, or return to engagement when we have left, while the messy business of life works itself out through us.

I’m less and less impressed with our human agency in working things out. Problem solving, empathy and listening are wonderful and necessary skills, but the real resolution feels like it comes, when it does come, from a more mysterious place. It’s almost like our job is simply to stick around with as much compassion and courage as we can muster while life does what life does. But it’s incredibly challenging to stay in the heat of disagreement long enough to melt down into some new and truer alloy.

Having been in a marriage for many decades now, I can’t tell you the number of times I have found myself in the middle of a difficult place with my partner and felt utterly hopeless against whatever issue was dividing us. There are places we go where it is simply self-evident that there is no way forward—no solution—no resolution possible. But again and again, as we are able to hang out in that place of no resolution with some modicum of goodwill, something shifts. Maybe not right away. Maybe not till after many tears, accusations and realizations, but, if we are resolute and patient, something new emerges.

This is not the same as compromise which is where I give something and you give something and neither one of us is happy but neither one of us is totally disappointed. Sometimes that is necessary – mostly around the small stuff. But in matters of the heart and soul, something more creative is necessary.

Real staying means that I have to show up as my full self and you have to show up as your full self. Trying to take care of the other person by being ‘nice’ turns out to be a barrier that needs to be breached. If I give up myself to try to placate you, then something new is prevented from arising.

So I’m trying to notice what keeps me from showing up as myself—what stops my willingness to express my point of view as valued part of the situation. I’m also working to become more aware of the assumptions about others prevent me from hearing the truth beneath positions and opinions that are strange to me.

I wish to help create a world where we all get to show up as ourselves and are continually willing to release our certainty in service of the emerging life that reveals itself anew through us.

Attachment to Drama

Yesterday morning as usual, over my bowl of steel- cut oats and my cup of fresh-brewed coffee, I opened the New York Times and started reading. I never read the whole thing, but rather scan for articles that seem important. I was reassured, in an odd way, to see news about the continuing pandemic at the top rather than mid-way down or at the bottom of the opening spread. This continuing health disaster, accounting for more deaths in one year than all of World War II, has finally become the main issue it should have been for the past ten months.

But, to my dismay, I found myself skipping over all these articles and looking for stories about our former President. Apparently, I have developed some kind of attachment to my ongoing objections. I appear to be slightly addicted to my visceral responses to the terrible stuff he was doing in the last weeks of his term in office. Some part of me wants to keep reading about how bad it was and how narrowly the forces of good defeated the engines of evil.

I am slightly ashamed and quite interested.

The past four years have been very disturbing to me as our then-President shattered norms and pushed democracy to the brink of collapse. Over time I learned to be careful about the amount of time I spent looking at the newspaper or consuming news in any form. If I ingested too much, I would fall into states of agitation and fear that were difficult to exit.

We human beings are amazing in our capacity to read words on a page or hear someone talking on a screen and, from that, to imagine all kinds of awful and wonderful things. This capacity to create worlds in our minds is one of our great blessings and great difficulties.

One wonderful thing about these dreaming verbal minds is that we can think of what has never been. If my house is painted yellow, I can imagine what it might look like painted green. If my country is led by someone who I think is only concerned with enriching himself, I can imagine other leaders who might be less self-obsessed and then work to get them elected. If my mind is swirling with fearful thoughts, I can consider what I might do or not do in order to diminish my visceral suffering.

But one difficultly with our minds is that we can’t tell the difference between something that is actually going on and something we are just thinking. For example, imagine you are holding a slice of lemon in your hand right now. Picture the bright yellow wedge and imagine smelling its tangy citrus aroma. Now imagine bringing this slice toward your mouth and taking a big bite. Are you salivating and/or bracing for the sour tang in your mouth? There is no lemon nearby, but our minds are fooled.

Similarly, we react to what is happening in the country based on our thoughts and stories about what is happening (and what has happened) in the country. Have we narrowly avoided a strongman dictator who overturned rightfully conducted elections or have the elections somehow been manipulated by those in power for their own benefit? Many of the people who stormed the Capital on January 6 saw themselves to be true and courageous patriots. In their minds, they were saving the country from the Jews and the Blacks and the liberals who were stealing what is rightfully theirs.

This is where ‘truth’ comes in. Historically, we have agreed upon certain assumptions about what is ‘really going on.’ These assumptions have to do with verifiable information that can be evaluated by impartial judges who, in the end, will mostly agree about what happened. Our democracy is based on a freedom to debate and discuss the causes and the meanings of events, but our current divide seems to be more along the lines of an argument about truth itself.

But back to my problem.

Am I willing to let go of my attachment to my righteous certainty of good and evil? Can I let go of the thrill of outrage of high drama and begin reading articles about legislation and the complex work of a functioning democracy trying to meet unprecedented challenges?

I do indeed think we came very very close to losing our democracy to the machinations of one man and his cabal of authoritarian henchmen. But he was defeated in the past election and Joe Biden is now President. Biden once jokingly promised a boring Presidency and already the daily drama has lessened. White House press conferences are happening again and involve questions and answers. National strategies to fight against the pandemic are being constructed and rolled out based on evidence and science.

Huge and momentous issues are being debated and discussed. Power struggles and political jockeying for position are endless. But I do think we have entered new territory and I want to do my part to de-escalate the rhetoric and to moderate my extremist tendencies. In the end, I’m more than willing to give up the high drama of the past four years and to do my part to find new ways to live, work and be together.

Relationships as Possibility

Relationships, both with the people we care about and with the people we don’t care about, unfold over time through multiple actions and reactions. And every relationship contains within it, all the other relationships we have ever had.

Many of our perceptions and reactions in our relationships are more about what has happened to us before than to what is happening to us in the moment. If I felt lonely as a young boy, I will more sensitive to things you say or do, however small, that awaken that ancient sense of being alone. If other relationships have lessened my capacity to trust that it’s OK to show up as myself, I will unconsciously interpret things you do as evidence to verify the lessons I carry with me. So when we relate to others, we are also relating to ourselves and to the history of every relationship we have ever had.

Through the pandemic I have had the good fortune to be in a bubble with my wife, daughter, son-in-law, grandson and one Zen friend. I’m thinking now especially of my grandson Isaiah who is nearly two. Just about one day a week, my wife and I have had the pleasure of taking care of him while his parents work. With so many grandparents unable to travel and be in physical connection with their grandchildren, I’m a little embarrassed to write about him, but, he has been and continues to be a great teacher for me, so I feel compelled to mention him again.

Over the past year Isaiah has learned to jump from small ledges, walk backwards while laughing, formulate his experience into full sentences (‘Red car goes down street.’) and help me wash the dishes. I have to admit that he’s not very efficient yet as a dishwasher, but the enthusiasm he brings to the task more than compensates for his lack of skill. Isaiah has also learned that sometimes he doesn’t get what he wants but that his grandfather doesn’t always know the guidelines and may also be more likely to bend to his will than his parents so, hey, it’s worth a try. But all these interactions, with me, with his parents, with his teachers and friends at nursery school—all these formative interactions will not be consciously remembered by him as he moves through the years and decades (hopefully) of his life ahead.

Our world-view forms long before our capacity to remember or talk about it does. Like all children, Isaiah, will hold these deep and formative experiences as a template to organize information and experience as it comes to him throughout his life. Perhaps he’ll remember a few things from the coming year of being three, but his conscious memory won’t really kick in in an organized way until he’s four or five, or that’s how it is for me looking back. So Isaiah, like all of us, will be reacting to the people in his life based on the lessons he has learned from the past, a huge chunk of which will be unavailable to his conscious memory. Seems like a recipe for misunderstanding and confusion.

Indeed, misunderstanding, confusion and therefore conflict and difficulty are an unavoidable part of relationships. Relationships not just with other people, but with the world around us and even with ourselves. The template of our understanding is always trying to fit new information and experiences into what has come before. While this is healthy and necessary, it also leads to significant misinterpretation and the general lag of our current understanding with what is actually happening in the moment.

But the good news is that through this necessary confusion and conflict we can actually come to a deeper understanding of ourselves and each other. Some of the things I have learned in the past are accurate and helpful. But other assumptions that guide my thought and behavior, while they may have been true at one time, are no longer true or useful. Relationship with others, especially ones that are challenging, can help us understand and work with the many unconscious assumptions we carry with us.

This is why I think that relationships are, at their heart, a spiritual practice. Fancy words, being nice and looking good are no match for the reality of living with or being in an ongoing relationship for another being. Even fiercely held limiting beliefs about the world can be worn down, cured and even transformed in the crucible of being with each other. Our partners and family, our friends, our pets and even our enemies are all wonderful teachers. Through each person we meet, we can begin to see through our limited certainty about how things are and how things should be into the wide possibilities that are always emerging at this very moment.

Everyone we encounter, in person or through what we see on TV or read in the paper is some kind of reflection of our many selves. From this perspective, we can be curious about each other whether we agree or not. There is plenty of room for variety both inside and out. Even with our partners and close friends (especially with our partners and close friends?) we will not agree on everything. With people from different backgrounds and political perspectives, the necessary differences may be even more obvious.

This is not a problem, but a starting point. When we loosen our expectation that everyone should be just like us we can begin to appreciate the wondrous variation of the world around and within us. Everyone we meet is some important part of who we are.

Mr. Rogers was right, each person we meet is our neighbor and has an internal life of depth, difficulty and value. And today is indeed a beautiful day in the neighborhood.