I’m not particularly fond of U2, but one of their songs sticks in my head. “You’ve got yourself stuck in a moment and now you can’t get out of it,” croons Bono. The accompanying video depicts a high school athlete who missed a critical point and lost the big football game for his team, and has never recovered. I think of this tune often because I often get stuck in a moment. Several moments. An avalanche of moments.
These sticking points may be quotidian or momentous. I recently bought a new printer (which is a whole other essay. I cannot get it to do what I want it to do, no matter how much I cry or swear at it), and donated the old one to a family in need in town. I’m signed up for HP Instant Ink, which means that the all-seeing and all-knowing Big Brother in the interweb sends me ink whenever I need it. I had removed the old printer on their site, and registered the new one, but that seemed not to take as I still received emails about page usage on the old one. This irritated me in an irrationally outsized way because, a) I had followed their directions and deactivated it online, and b) more importantly because I knew it would mean queueing in virtual hell for an agent after pushing approximately eight billion buttons to get to “representative” while listening to egregious elevator music on an endless loop. I had conversations with the imaginary agent in my mind. I called the CEO of HP in my mind. I threw the new printer out to spite the old one in my mind. And then Mark Twain came to that same mind: “I have had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.” I did have to wait on the phone for a while, but a very professional agent resolved the issue for me in about fifteen minutes.
On the more serious end of the spectrum, I had a severe panic attack in the middle of the night a while back because an upset stomach woke me up. Illness triggers my anxiety, and Covid has only magnified that impact. Before the haze of interrupted sleep lifted, I had convinced myself that I had Covid, and would die alone in bed. A familiar but unpleasant feeling of ice water replacing my blood flooded my senses with fear and fully woke me up. Should I try to make it to the bathroom? My limbs felt tingly and numb. Should I call 911? And say what, “I think I have Covid and may die alone in bed?” Should I call my sister? My son? And say what, “I think I have Covid and may die alone in bed?” My breathing had become shallow and rapid, which only further convinced me that the coronavirus would take me immediately. Nary a rational thought entered my mind, until, curled fetally, I strove to recall my yoga teacher training. “Breathe,” I told myself with compassion. “What do you know for sure?” I asked myself, and after what felt like hours but was really likely several extraordinarily uncomfortable minutes, I managed to talk myself down from the ledge. As always happens after a panic attack for me, I had an anxiety hangover the next day, and experienced aftershocks of the quake that waked me the night before.
During that same yoga teacher training we studied Buddhist philosophy, and I recalled one of its key tenets: Impermanence. That nothing lasts for ever - joy or sorrow - can be a great source of suffering because we tend to attach like superglue to whatever happens to us moment to moment. Buddhism explains that the only way to escape the suffering is to recognize the impermanence of the agony and the ecstasy, and remain fully planted in the present moment, and experience, with the perspective of an observer, whatever it is we feel. Simple, yes. Easy, no. It is - as is yoga - an ongoing practice.
I have tried to apply this principle to the big elephant in the room as well. The ever-evolving Covid-19 crisis has all but forced us into unnatural hibernation, wreaking havoc - minor and major - in its wake. It feels like it will never end, even as the vaccines rollout and jab into bared willing upper arms. But it will. The excruciating aspect of this, as will those things quotidian and momentous, is that we don’t know when, and the ending is not always a happy one. The Buddhist philosophy is not a Pollyanna-ish panacea. It does not provide Dev Patel’s character’s guarantee in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel: “everything will work out in the end, and if it hasn’t worked out it’s not the end.” It is the uncertainty, for many of us - especially for me - that is excruciating.
But then I return to U2, to the wisdom of Bono and The Edge. Interestingly, the song opens with the lyric, “I’m not afraid of anything in this world.” I want to be that narrator. The one who knows that there is nothing to fear because nothing lasts forever. The one who sits with and observes their discomfort. The one who watches a friend wallow in misery, missing life while expecting somehow that it will turn out differently if they obsess about it enough. I doubt I’ll ever get this exactly right in this lifetime, but I do know that a moment or two of deep breath often reels me back in from the event horizon of a black hole of perseveration back to the present moment where, for the moment, everything is ok.
Deep thoughts, extremely well expressed. Thank you for turning your frustrations and anxieties into something positive and sharing it so eloquently. (And, by the way, one of the worst things in life is the experience of buying a new printer. It should be avoided at all costs.)