You Are Wiser Than Before

When I was in my twenties, I was psychologically immortal.  I wasn’t happy – I was closeted, in the wrong career, and mostly incapable of emotional intimacy.  But I was young and healthy, and almost no one I loved had died. I took life for granted

And then… life happened.  Over the next several years, my father died, a friend was killed in a terrorist attack, relationships ended, another friend died, I lost a high-status job, and, eventually, I stopped taking the general reliability of life for granted.  I didn’t become a fearful or gloomy person – on the contrary, I’m much happier than I was twenty-five years ago. But I did grow older, and maybe a bit wiser.

I bring all this up because our latest Covid transition feels a little similar.

Remember last summer?  In New York City, where I live, we had literal fireworks and a superstar rock concert to celebrate the end of the pandemic.  Appropriately, most of the concert was rained out, just like the Hot Vax Summer itself, which ended with the arrival of the Delta wave.  And then came the Omicron wave, less deadly but more contagious. 

Now, with case numbers dropping, we’re (again) returning to something like normal life, maybe this time for good (?).  But I’m not seeing any fireworks.  On the contrary, many of us are tentative, uncertain – even those of us who have returned to having friends over for dinner and going out to cultural events. We were, collectively, more than a little traumatized by the whiplash of 2021.  We got really excited, and then we got hurt.  And now we don’t want to get hurt again.

Check inside your mind and heart after a few minutes of meditation. Take a look “under the hood,” past the exhaustion or sense of ‘over it,’ to see what’s underneath: maybe relief, optimism, fear, nervousness, joy, fear of joy.  Maybe anger.  Everyone’s swirl of feelings will be different, but almost everyone, I suspect, has a swirl.

And, probably, some aversion to even feeling the swirl.

In the Buddhist roots of mindfulness, this wisdom is a bit part of waking up: seeing directly, in your meditation and your experience, that life is not reliable.  Everything is impermanent, and like your favorite software license, it is subject to change at any moment.  Death is inescapable, and often shows up sooner than you expect.  People have capacities for both love and cruelty, wisdom and stupidity.  This is how life is.

So what should we do?  Crawl under the covers and mope?  Even in the original, monastic origins of Buddhism, that approach was rejected.  Instead, the Buddha developed a “middle way” that leaned back somewhat – for example, not putting all your eggs in the basket of the Hot Vax Summer – but still lived in the world.

That original “middle way” (which, among other things, involved being a monk or nun) may itself seem too ascetic for most of us today, but the principle still holds true.  Wisdom lies neither in giving up on life nor in pretending that suffering doesn’t exist. You are not immortal.  Your health, friends, family, loved ones, safety, security, and life can be taken from you at any moment.  And yet, life is still suffused with wonder and beauty, with community and relationship, with work that matters because it leads to more happiness and less suffering in the world.

There’s got to be a way to hold both truths: that life is unreliable, and that it can be filled with joy, love, compassion, and the pursuit of justice.

Mindfulness meditation offers one such way.  By paying close attention to our inner lives, we can see, directly, how we suffer when we really invest ourselves in things working out a certain way, because they often don’t.  You can see this clearly if you bring up one such loss in your meditation, and explore the feelings around it.  But you can also see it on absurd, microscopic levels, like when you want a “sit” to be smooth and it ends up being bumpy, or when you really want that back pain to go away, and it doesn’t.

If you see this enough times, over and over again, gradually the brain rewires itself, and you don’t invest in quite the same way.  You still go out dancing, make love, march in a protest, get your kid to school, visit your sick relative, or stay home and Netflix & chill – but you do so in a somewhat lighter way.  This lightness – this not holding on so tightly, this endless, every-minute process of letting go – is a bit hard to describe, but it’s the experience of millions of people who have built a meditation practice over a long period of time.  One word for it, I kid you not, is nirvana.

It's also the heart of equanimity. Mindful equanimity doesn’t mean dulling yourself out, so that everything is a bland shade of gray and you don’t have to feel anything.  That’s aversion, not equanimity.  Equanimity is about riding the roller coaster while also knowing that there are ups and downs and beginnings and endings and that’s how life is.  But here’s your ticket to ride.

Chances are, you have gained some of this wisdom over the last two years, even if you didn’t want it.  You’ve experienced profound disorientation, and you’ve learned what can help and how to live.  You are wiser than you were.

Of course, none of us knows this latest Covid transition will end up.  Are we done?  Done for now?  Is it too early to say?  Is the worst yet to come?  What about immune-compromised folks? I do know that I’m very thankful for cases going down, for schools opening up, and for dancing with a thousand strangers at a rave last week.  After another rough winter, I’m unfolding again.  It feels delightful.  For now.