Fear & the Inauguration (Join us Jan 20)

The Inauguration. And the difference between fear and anxiety.

tl;dr: A reflection on fear, anxiety and the inauguration. Including a note on my most recent intimate encounter with fear. Including an exercise and an invitation.

The USA’s Presidential Inauguration is two weeks away. And many (not all) of us are terrified. So I’m inviting us to do two things:

1. Join our community in an hour of community song and prayer precisely at same time as the swearing in. Monday, January 20 at 12PM East. Interestingly, this is also the day that we honor the life and vision of the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. Click here to register and we’ll send you a calendar invite.

2. Write down everything you are afraid is going to happen under this new administration. You don’t have to show it to anyone. Although you are certainly welcome to share.

It is not my intention to stir up your anxiety.

My intention is for all of us to learn.

To learn the distinction between fear and anxiety.

To take our own written record, and test and see for ourselves. So that we have concrete evidence to help us remember that our forecasts are always off.

I recently told you about an Adam Grant Opinion Essay in the New York Times. The title says it all:

If You’re Sure How the Next Four Years Will Play Out, I Promise: You’re Wrong.

He gives example after example of how our forecasts are inevitably off. For the better. As well as for the worse.

My favorite line in the essay is where Grant says that: “the average expert was roughly as accurate as a dart-throwing chimpanzee.”

And that’s why I’m making my invitation.

So that we can test our anxiety against what actually happens.

Write down all of your fears. Write down your forecasts. Even write down the fears you felt before the election. All the things you said would happen if this guy took office again.

Write them down and put the document away where you can easily find it again. You can take it out from time to time when one of your predictions is spot on. Or you can look at it in four years and see where you were right and where you were wrong.

It is not my intention to minimize the gravity of the situation. I am not unaware that real people are facing life and death situations. That there is great disruption coming our way. That our fellow citizens have made a choice that will have an impact on the climate for generations to come. Not just the next four years.

But I am also aware that we live in a media ecosystem that hijacks our limbic system. That we evolved to be alert to threat. That we are a hypervigilant, originally vulnerable, mammalian species. And we are really good at being afraid. Because fear can save our lives.

You and I have not evolved to live in a 24 hour newscycle.

Our danger and empathy sensors are not made for a global news ecosystem.

We do not have the capacity to hold every horror that is happening in the world. Pick any time in history and know this to be true: at any given moment, something terrible was happening to a whole bunch of people somewhere. But most of us were not “informed.” The information would not reach us until it mattered to us. And yes, some of those times it was too late.

Too many of us are walking around intensely aware of the news. Beset. Burdened. But at the same time, we are terribly unaware of the limiting impact of our “stance of alarm.” It has a shattering impact on our nervous systems. On our culture. And most importantly, on our capacity to respond.

We are zapping hope out of the ether.

The data shows that our young are not looking brightly at the future. And yet it is they who are here to shape it. We cannot lose perspective. It makes it harder for our descendants.

Let us make effort to pay attention to what Byung Chul Han is trying to teach. Hope… is born of despair. It emerges from suffering and challenge and directs us toward novelty. Hope is a searching movement… that enters into the unknown, goes down untrodden paths… into ‘what-is-not-yet’. (h/t Alexander Beiner)

It is my hope that if you actually write down what you are afraid will happen. You will give yourself a chance to see where you were right and where you were wrong. You too will come to the understanding that most of the things you are afraid of are things that never come true.

Worth repeating: most of the things you are afraid of are things that never come true.

Stay with me if you are triggered. If you don't think I'm taking things seriously enough.

I work to help people heal. What that means is that I stare into the abyss. I have to be able to see what tries to break us. I am keenly and painfully aware of the horrors that we perpetrate upon each other. Upon children. And upon the most vulnerable. I am viscerally aware of the long, life shaping, impact of the horrors that we suffer. Aware of this inexplicable human capacity for evil. Of my own capacity to harm. And the ways in which I have.

And I know that it is bigger than individuals. I was born a colonial subject. I know the way whole peoples get oppressed for generations.

I am not denying reality.

This is why one of my central spiritual goals is to learn to live life on its own terms. This means I must know life’s terms. I have to know what the terms are in order to be able to accept them. And as I often repeat here, these terms are best spelled out by the five Buddhist Remembrances:

• I am of the nature of illness; I cannot escape illness.

• I am of the nature to get old; I cannot escape old age.

• I am of the nature of death; I cannot escape death.

• I am of the nature to be separated from all that is dear to me and everyone I love.

• I am the owner of my actions, heir to my actions, born of my actions, related to my actions, and supported by my actions. Whatever I do, for good or ill, I will inherit the result.

This is the catastrophe of it all. At least four of these are going to happen. To each and everyone of us. There is no escape, no one will remain unscathed.

We think we fear an inauguration. But what we are afraid of is the very nature of reality.

We are afraid of what is definitely going to happen.

What a waste of energy!

I am not calling us to inaction. I am calling us to wise action. And it is harder to be wise when we live in a state of fear. It makes us tight, rigid and small. When what we need is to be wise. And to be agile.

My own encounter with fear

I recently had an intimate encounter with fear. It showed up as part of a healing ceremony. I was the one being doctored.

The medicine wanted me to become familiar with my own fear. It was terrible.

But as I surrendered to the process I realized that when we are afraid, we actually experience two fears.

1. There is the fear itself.

2. And there is the fear of being afraid.

I first had to deal with the fear of being afraid.

I could sense the little boy in me who must have been scared of many things many times. Like all little kids are.

We get scared and some well meaning older voice says: “don’t be afraid.” And just like that, we learn to try and shut our fear away. This is why the first thing that we feel when fear comes, is fear of the fear itself!

I had to move through that first fear first. The gateway fear. And in doing so, I started to feel the second fear. The fear that had been locked up in my body. I shook, and I cried, and I felt like a little boy. There was no story revealed in the ceremony. No psychological memory. It was just fear. Stored body fear. Being felt. Working itself out.

It was awful.

And it was liberating.

And I’ve been reflecting on the experience ever since.

There is no full consensus on how thinkers and teachers distinguish fear from anxiety. No agreement on how the words are used. So I’m going to use the distinction that works the best for me.

• Fear is in the present. And it is based on what is real.

• Anxiety is of the future. And it is most often rooted in the past.

Fear

Fear is good.

Fear can save your life.

If something terrible is happening fear will help you do what you need to do.

You will fight back. You will escape. You will give in. You will do whatever it takes to live. To try to be ok.

And one of two things will happen:

1. You will succeed.

2. Or you will fail.

These are life’s terms. Bad things happen. We figure out what to do. Or we fail to do so. Loss is embedded in the game.

Every single one of us will “lose” our body’s last battle.

This is part of what it means to be a human animal walking upon sacred earth.

Anxiety

Anxiety on the other hand… anxiety is not so useful. It is useful in that it points you to something that has to heal.

Fear is in the present. Anxiety is of the future. Anxiety is about what might or might not be. And it is often a reaction to what has already been. You are anxious because something bad happened in the past. And you never want to feel that way again.

This is where healing comes in. And it takes a whole lot of time. But it is available to you. And the news is doing nothing to help you.

Anxiety is not your fault. We live in a culture that breeds and grows it. We lack structures of belonging. We lack shared ways of wisdom and meaning. We live in an economy of precarity.

There is nothing quite like hard times to learn to pierce through the lie. To find our ground. To shake and shake and shake these bodies out. You know… the way we mammals know to do.

Something bad happened on election day.

On January 20 it will be affirmed.

There are dark times ahead.

And nothing I’ve said here is meant to make light of it.

It’s just that I also believe in us.

In at-least-70,000-years-of-human-culture us.

In getting through bad thing after bad thing. Not as individuals. But as people.

Holding song and story, prayer and ritual, dance and laughter and love and screams. Delighted and despaired into existence.

It just feels like there is something that we know. Something that we know know. About how to be in these times.

And anxious is not the way.

And resentment is even worse.

But together is a good way. Not getting-each-other-jacked-up on whatever chemicals are released when we all stampede off a cliff together. But together together. Sober before life and its terms. With that hope that is borne of despair. Taking our rightful place as future ancestors to our descendants.