On Being Disturbed

I woke at 3:30 this morning mulling over what Coronovirus might mean for the Boundless Way Temple going forward. Residential retreats have been at the heart of our Zen practice community since we bought this building ten years ago. We certainly won’t be having any of them in the next few months, and a conversation with a retreat organizer overseas yesterday brought home to me the reality that we may not have any residential retreats through the end of the year…and perhaps beyond.

We won’t be going back to normal—it’s gradually sinking in now. While we are beginning to see signs of the infection rate slowing, this ongoing experience of fear of viral infection will change our social and physical interactions forever. Restaurants will, of course, reopen at some point. But the small places that used to feel cozy and charming may now feel too dangerous to venture in. Will we eat out with Plexiglas dividers between us? Or with tables carefully arranged six to twelve feet apart? We don’t know what the new world will look like, but we won’t be going back to the way it was.

One model for thinking about how organizations (and organisms) change is called ‘punctuated equilibrium.’ Rather than understanding growth as a neat upward moving line, this theory says times of relative stability are interrupted by periods of significant structural change. This makes sense to me as I look back at my life history and at the experience of organizations I have been associated with. Things move along fairly predictably, until something happens that causes disruption to the comfortable and formerly functional patterns of behavior, then we have to find new ways of being—new assumptions and new ways of doing things.

These places of disruption are hard for human beings to bear. Almost all of us like predictability and stability. We like to know what will be happening tomorrow and next week and next year. We get anxious when we lose faith in our capacity to know what is coming. Our minds get us into all kinds of trouble as we imagine scenarios that cause us to lose sleep and live in a state of worry and fear.

Looking back, we can see that each one of us has weathered all of those places of danger and significant change. The many times when we could not see our way forward, when our carefully made plans were abruptly derailed by factors beyond our control. They all turned out OK. We might not have gotten what we wanted, but we are all still here and life is still fully going on.

Significant and unexpected change disorganizes us and leads us to places we had never considered going. We leave our old world behind (sometimes moaning and complaining) to enter into a new world with new possibilities and new challenges. These many worlds of our lives come and go like a dream. Once I lived in a dorm and went to college. Once I was the father of a young daughter. Once I went out to dinner at restaurants as a treat when I didn’t feel like cooking at home.

What seems solid one moment, soon is just a memory. Even the troubles that wake us up in the middle of the night and won’t let us sleep fade into a hazy memory.   What is so urgent at one moment, I can hardly remember a few days or weeks or years later.

This brings me back to the issue a faith that my friend brought up a few days ago. Where does it come from and what if it doesn’t have to do with a old man with a beard sitting on a cloud in the sky?

What if I had faith that everything would somehow be OK? ‘OK’ clearly doesn’t mean that I get things to be the way I think they should be, but perhaps that’s not the point of life. Perhaps there is a deeper ‘OK’ that I can learn, little by little, to trust?

I’m reminded of a native American song I came across when I was twenty and in the middle of a period of great turmoil and transition in my life:

Why do I go about pitying myself,
when all the time
I am being carried
on great winds across the sky?