Pat Taub
Last week was not a good news week for me. It left me full of despair.
I agonized over the Biden’s administration failure to advance their social programs designed to help those in need, while increasing oil drilling in defiance of climate change. To make matters worse the saber rattling over Putin’s troops on the Ukraine border, kept me up at night consumed with images of World War lll.
Among the US soldiers that could be deployed to the Ukraine (The New York Times)
My youngest son advised me to stop reading lefty blogs. My older son recommended that I embrace a carefree old age. I readily dismissed the dopey advice of the White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, who told the politically discouraged to “go to a kickboxing class and have a margarita.”
While I appreciate my children’s advice, it doesn’t go far enough.
Suddenly I remembered that in the past, when worries consumed me, I found comfort in Buddhist writings.
If I were a better Buddhist follower, it wouldn’t have taken me so long to come to this conclusion. In a better-late-than-never mode, I scanned my bookshelf and retrieved a book by Joanna Macy, a popular Buddhist teacher and writer. Macy got my attention with her advice that engaging with fear is the way forward, while insisting that we can’t conquer our fears alone. She recommends:
“The response required. . .is to grow a sense of solidarity with others and to elaborate a whole new sense of what our resources are and what our power is.”
Joanna Macy, the Buddhist thinker and activist
In other words, the world becomes less scary when we can join with cohorts, working for a common goal. A reminder for me to get off my duff and engage more fully with groups working for climate change and other issues dear to my heart.
Another well-known Buddhist teacher, Joan Halifax, writes that compassion is instrumental to conquering fear and feeling helpless. She defines compassion as “the capacity to be attentive to others and to sense what will truly serve others.”
A random act of compassion
Halifax implies that when we respond compassionately to those in need, we become less self-absorbed. (What me, self-absorbed?) Additionally, when we reach out to those in need, we grow more hopeful and, in turn, less afraid.
Similarly, the psychotherapist Miriam Greenspan maintains that engaging with fear allows us to open our hearts and be better able to connect to others, because we’re all afraid on some level. In the same vein, Martin Luther King refers to our “inescapable web of mutuality.”
The Dalai Lama weighs in on compassion, when he preaches that compassion is “essential for peace and mutual stability. . . Compassion is the radicalization of our times.”
A compassionate perspective makes it possible to identify with the less fortunate, or with those with whom we hold different world views. Compassion builds bridges.
In my distress, I had overlooked the importance of opening up to close friends, who share my perspective. When I face my fears and confide in like-minded friends and receive their support, I breathe a big sigh of relief. Hope has been restored to me. It’s like turning on a light in a dark room, where my fears recede into the background.
Thankfully, I now have a new go-forward plan for managing my fears: reaching out to others who share my concerns and joining them in social actions; a commitment to performing random acts of kindness every day; and to express gratitude for all that is good in my life. Above all, I will keep hope alive. Just writing this lightens my mood.
