How Are You?

How are you doing?

No – really. How are you?

Maybe I should ask, how are you right now? My moods shift by the minute. In just the last couple of days, I’ve felt “over it”, anxious, hopeful, fearful, joyful, tuned in spiritually, tuned out spiritually, profoundly sad at the enormity of the crisis, profoundly angry at what could have been done, lonely, tired, at rest, restless, grateful, irritated, and of course, mindful, mindless, and everything in between.

Watching the mind, in these circumstances, is like watching a circus parade, except that sometimes I forget that it’s just a show and become caught up in the parade myself, marching along in sadness or anger or fear. Until something brings me back.

I’ve also noticed that, despite the rhetoric of “we’re all in this together,” actually we’re all experiencing this phenomenon differently. In part that depends on class, privilege, age, race, relationship status, luck, occupation, and social position. In part, it’s just how we’re wired. 

But we’re not all feeling the same. I have friends who are really suffering from isolation and having too much time on their hands. Yet as the parent of a three-year-old, I haven’t had time on my hands since March. I’d love to be bored. In fact, I’m sure we’d each like a quick taste of one another’s lives.

Our dominant experiences change over time, too. Last Spring, mine were mostly about survival, coping with anxiety, and parenting in this radically new way. My summer and fall opened up and outward, from Black Lives Matter protests to seeing friends again, taking vacation, even finding some help with childcare. For a while, I was even more anxious about politics than about the pandemic.

And now? After the weirdest and possibly worst New Year’s Eve ever, I find that my dominant emotion is disorientation. It is the best of times, with vaccines a reality, and the worst of times, as infection rates skyrocket and hospitals fill up. I haven’t seen most of my friends in two months and, to be honest, I don’t really want to anymore. January and February look very, very dark. 

And yet, you know, life goes on; Netflix is on; I baked cupcakes with my daughter today. What else can we do?

Now, it’s hardly news that life is unpredictable and impermanent. This is the nature of things—as well as some of the core insights of the Buddhist traditions that gave birth to contemporary secular mindfulness. But it’s still profoundly disorienting when that ‘insight’ becomes our lived experience, when the denial we all live within is suddenly stripped away, when we actually feel the bottom drop out of our lives, and see that everything could change—that we or our loved ones could die, or that we could lose our homes, or our ways of life—at any moment.

As Albert Camus wrote in The Plague, “Pestilence is so common, there have been as many plagues in the world as there have been wars, yet plagues and wars always find people equally unprepared.”

How could this happen? we ask ourselves, even though this has always happened. 

The point is not that we could have done better in preparation and response, although of course we could have. Rather, it is the shock that the world in which I had lived with such security and certainty, is in fact insecure and uncertain. And that somehow, life, in all its mundanity and profundity, goes on regardless.  

The great innovation of the Buddha, in creating mindfulness and meditation as we teach them today, was his refusal to deny our existential insecurity—by positing a benevolent deity, for example, or placing faith in human ingenuity—or to distract ourselves from it.  But rather, to develop tools that enable us to live with it.

Mindfulness enables us to ask ourselves “how are you?” with greater and greater clarity. Meditation trains us to release the clinging to the good stuff and the terror of the bad. We can be at home, and happy, even in the midst of… this.

There is no changing the impermanence, contingency, and unreliability of the human condition. There is only the possibility of changing our minds and hearts to accommodate them, to live with them in a way that enables contentment, love, the pursuit of justice, compassion, and even joy. To see the crumbling stilts beneath the house, and still read the email newsletter. To neither deny the truth of the human condition nor be devastated by it.  

Admittedly, this probably isn’t what most people mean by “comfort.” But it’s the best way I know to live, in times like these.