YKWIM 97: For My Young Friends Who Are Afraid

That's the world, and we all live there.

Jun 03, 2022

The 100th newsletter is coming up and it’s a Q&A special. Feel free to leave your Qs here.

I read Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management For Morals by Oliver Burkeman about a month ago and it’s been on my mind ever since. I’ve tried to describe it to mixed results (Me: “It’s basically about coming to terms with the fact that you have less time left to live than you think and you’ll never get done with everything you want to do because capitalism will always keep making that to-do list longer despite the time management hacks that the hamster wheel turn faster, and what we really need to do is give ourselves a break and accept our own morality since we’re all going to die sooner rather than later.” My friend: “Oh, GOD.”) but for me, it was exactly what I needed right now.

I’ve been especially ruminating on this paragraph lately:

Some Zen Buddhists hold that the entirety of human suffering can be boiled down to this effort to resist paying full attention to the way things are going, because we wish they were going differently (“This shouldn’t be happening!”), or because we wish we felt more in control of the process. There is a very down-to-earth kind of liberation in grasping that there are certain truths about being a limited human from which you’ll never be liberated. You don’t get to dictate the course of events. And the paradoxical reward for accepting reality’s constraints is that they no longer feel so constraining.

Oh, right, accepting my lack of control, that’s like, Therapy 101. I can’t make people email me back, I can’t make choices for others, I can’t make a dog come to me when I call (I watched over a couple pups lately so this is on my mind). All I can control is myself, of course, of course, of course, la la la. I might not like it (in fact, I do not like it!) but whatever, I get it.

Then there’s that line: “You don’t get to dictate the course of events.” The lack of control in my personal life, that’s one thing. To world at large is something else. All of the pain from the last couple weeks makes this feel so much heavier and harder. Does it feel that way to you? Being told “Vote!” in mid-May as if I wasn’t already going to do that, as if that’s going to change anything right now, as if shit doesn’t seem bleak. I want action, I want things to change, I want things to stop getting worse.

I’ve also been reading The Places That Scare You. One of Pema Chödrön’s big things is that we can’t rely on hope. Having hope is a way of escaping the present and avoiding suffering— which we can never really avoid anyway.

The first time I tried to read When Things Fall Apart, I threw it across the room. More than once. I eventually walked over and picked it up but I wasn’t happy about it.

In a nontheistic state of mind, abandoning hope is an affirmation, the beginning of the beginning. You could even put “Abandon hope” on your refrigerator door instead of more conventional aspirations like “Every day in every way I’m getting better and better.”
Hope and fear come from feeling that we lack something; they come from a sense of poverty. We can’t simply relax with ourselves. We hold on to hope, and hope robs us of the present moment. We feel that someone else knows what’s going on, but that there’s something missing in us, and therefore something is lacking in our world.

The heart of it is I want to hope. It’s embarrassing, actually. I hope a lot. Hope you get home safe, hope you have a nice weekend, hope you’re okay. I want hope because I want things to work out. I really do! I say this while acknowledging that things most often do not work that way. When it comes to the state of the world, it feels like giving up. It’s something I still need to sit with and feel my way through. I don’t know if I’ll ever be on the other side of it.

Anyway, here’s hoping I can become more hopeless! Sorry, I couldn’t resist.