How to Meet the Chaotic Moment with Greatheartedness
Most winter Mondays, I pull into the gym parking lot a little before 5pm, grab my sneaks, and hoof it through the cold towards the glowing outdoor light by the entrance. This past Monday, though, there was no glowing outdoor light. Which was the first time I'd noticed that the sun was still out.
The Old Farmer's Almanac tells me that after the winter solstice - when up here in Maine, we got nine-ish hours of sunlight each day - the sun stays around for a handful of seconds more each day. But those seconds start to add up, and right about now, we're getting a little over 10 hours of daily light.
Might seem like pretty small potatoes. What does 10 hours of daylight have to do with getting our country back on safer ground?
Perhaps a little more than we might think.
The Buddhists frame suffering as two arrows. The first arrow is what happens - there's chaos out of DC. The second arrow is how we respond to it.
This moment is populated with people responding like Chicken Little declaring that the sky is falling. It's terrifically useful to name that it feels like the sky is falling, to find the safety of those with whom we can take the pot's lid off and let steam out. As poet Adrienne Rich says, "There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors."
But our power lies in what we're doing to hold that sky up. Because that second arrow, how we respond to what life throws at us, is where our strength to meet the moment takes root.
In "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," Martin Luther King, Jr. distinguishes between a thermometer, that records the temperature, and a thermostat, that sets it.
Chicken Little is a thermometer. That second arrow is our chance to be a thermostat. To take what life's throwing at us and respond with grace, guts, greatheartedness. Which reminds others that courage is possible in the face of chaos.
The Vietnamese Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh described boats of crowded Vietnamese refugees crossing the Gulf of Thailand. If they encountered storms and everyone in the boat panicked, it would sink. But if even one person remained calm, the monk said, it could help return others to calm and the boat would survive the storm.
Now how, exactly, are we to get ourselves to that place of rootedness in the storm? To be the thermostat that sets the temperature?
This is where those extra daylight hours come in. Each observation about the delight and goodness life continues to throws at our feet - in the face of all that is decidedly not good - is a drop of fuel in our heart's tank.
I happened to see my neighbor shoveling out the fire hydrant so the fire department didn't have to. While getting my teeth cleaned, I discovered that my dentist was a champion in Dancing with the Dentists (it was a salsa number, I believe). For no reason other than kindness, the florist gave me a free vase with the bouquet of hydrangeas and white roses I'd purchased.
It's both smart fuel and smart strategy to savor these goodness. To point them out to others. If you see something (good), say something (to others who need to be reminded of the goodness that's still there).
The amazing thing about humans is we are big enough to hold multiple truths at once: chaos alongside beauty, hurt alongside hope.
"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function," wrote F. S. Scott Fitzgerald in The Crack Up. "One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless yet be determined to make them otherwise."
And let's remember this, too: the powerful want us perpetually overwhelmed and outraged. They want us spread so thin, we rip and tear. They want us slumping into burnout then cynicism then resignation.
The powerful have enough; we don't need to give them that, too.
Our work in these months ahead is to protect our care, our belief in a world that we can't yet see. To make that second arrow a thermostat and set the temperature. And to enjoy the steadily increasing daylight.