Dealing with Despair in a Troubled World, Part 2: Overcoming Obstacles that Paralyze Us

 

            In addition to taking action against despair, we can also look at how our own negative behaviors help to keep us in a despondent and anxious state of mind.  Often when we think of how we might change our responses we think in terms of future goals.  We say to ourselves “How can I become a calmer, more relaxed, and happy person?”   This seems like a reasonable question, but the Buddha might point out to us that it contains a trap.  This approach involves having some idea of “calm, relaxed, happy person” that we are hoping to arrive at in the future.  However, our idea of “calm, relaxed, happy person” is only an idea, and as such it doesn’t exist anywhere except in our thoughts.  It’s not real.  Likewise, the future is also merely thoughts in our mind and is not real either.  So we are trying to get to an unreal idea in some unreal future.  What we need to do instead is focus on what actually is real, and that is what we are doing in the present moment—right now, right here.  That’s real, and it is something we have direct access to.

            So a better question to ask ourselves is:  “What are the ways in which I am helping to bring anxiety, agitation, and despair into my life moment-to-moment right now?  When I look deeply in this way I will surprised by what I see.  But also encouraged because if I now see that I am doing things that make me anxious, agitated, and despondent—I can stop doing them. 

            My father had a deeply ingrained habit of searching for the negative side of almost everything (“the glass is half empty”) and it contributed greatly to his fears and depression.  I remember an incident that took place in my parents’ home. While sitting at the breakfast table, I witnessed the following conversation between Mom and Dad.  Mom is feeling very happy and says “These prunes I just got are just wonderful; I love them!”  Dad responds with “Yeah, but they have pits.”  Undeterred, Mom responds  “No, these are pitted prunes!” and Dad says  “Yeah, but the pitted prunes are really expensive.”  Mom comes right back with “No, I got these on sale.  They were very reasonable.”  Dad says “Yeah, but you can’t get that price all the time.”  Notice a pattern here?  I call this particular response pattern “Yeah, but…” and we have surely all encountered it numerous times in our lives. If we chooses to look hard enough, it seems that we can always find a dark cloud in any silver lining!

            My father had a very deeply ingrained pattern of bringing up the negative side almost every time someone said something.  It’s not that what he said was untrue, it’s just that always bringing up the negative had a profound impact on how he felt about life.  I had a similar problem after years of developing my critical thinking skills as a philosophy student and then professor.  I had learned how to find the defects in various philosophical theories and reasoning, and the habit of looking for what was wrong with things carried over and infected my whole life without my even realizing it.  If you go through life looking for the flaws in everything and everyone you certainly will find lots of them, and the world is going to seem like a horrible and depressing place as a result.  The flaws are real, but they are far from the totality of what exists.

            Mindfulness can help me to notice the existence of this mental habit of “Yeah, but…” or fault finding, and to adopt the practice of consciously choosing to respond in a neutral (“I can see the prunes are really adding something special to your breakfast”) or positive (“I really like prunes, too”) way.  Each time I don’t act on my “Yeah, but…” impulse it grows a little weaker.  And as it grows weaker, I may notice I don’t feel quite as negative and overwhelmed.  In my case, I still noticed flaws in theories and reasoning, but I also created a new habit of looking for what was of value in ideas, people, and situations.  And things of value really were there, it’s just that if I am constantly looking for flaws and obstacles I won’t see it.

            If we continue looking deeply for how our own behavior creates despair, we may find another culprit.  When we are paying attention, we will notice that there are typically two things present as we go through our day:  there are events that happen, and there are the mental stories that we construct about those events.  For example, I say “I’ve lost my job and I’ll never find a job that good again; my quality of life is really going to take a hit.”  All this may seem factual to me at the time, but if we look more deeply we will see something else. It is a fact that I lost my job, but the rest of it is a work of fiction about the future created by my mind.  We don’t know whether I’ll find another job that is as good, and we don’t know if my quality of life will take a hit (maybe it will be better).  But the fictional mental story created by my mind is often viewed as fact, and it often causes greater suffering than the fact that I lost my job.

            Climate change is no different.  So, yes, I am frightened and anxious about climate change but how much of those feelings are caused by the facts of climate change?  It is a fact that droughts are intensifying, and that hurricanes are more intense.  It is a fact that there are now bigger and more frequent wildfires.  But what else is present?  In many cases there is a very scary story about the future, a story that may or may not be true.  My mental story may be saying “It will get so hot and dry that it will be impossible to grow food and I will die.  When climate change really kicks in, mobs of people will be roving the streets breaking into houses and murdering me in order to steal my food.”  Now we’re getting really scary!  But we need to notice that all of this is a mental story and we do not know whether any of it will really become true in the future.

            Buddhism says that we can learn to pay attention to what is going on in our own mind, and then to notice how much of what is present is fact and how much is mental fiction.  When we begin to see the mentally created stories as stories and not facts, they lose much of their power to terrorize us and create anxiety.  The mind will probably always produce some fictional stories, but we can begin to see the stories for what they are and not be taken in by them.  We can make a practice of saying to ourselves “Oh, that’s just a mental story.  That could easily not be true at all.” 

            Since most mental stories are about future events, a useful practice here is to ask ourselves the question:  “Is there any problem in the present moment?”  So yes, it could happen in the future that the planet gets so hot and dry that no food can be grown.  But in this moment, is there any problem?  No.  I’m in a comfortable room working on a blog post on despair.  I have plenty of food, water, shelter, electricity, and am safe and I have friends.  Everything is ok.  It’s only when my mind goes careening off into a fictional future that I start to feel anxiety arise.

To be continued in the next post…

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