From the Vault: Mindfulness in a time of Suffering

I originally wrote this piece during Donald Trump’s first term when the Corona virus was beginning to stalk the land and before the lightening flash of identity politics took America by storm in the summer of 2020. It’s interesting to me to read it now and think of its application to the current wasteland we inhabit, from the growing corruption in the White House to the dehumanizing identity politics on the left. I wonder how you might see it? Leave me a comment below.

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I want to talk to you about the Corona virus but first I need to talk to you about America.

America,

that hurricane of Man’s boldness, is the product of our need to be free.

We are pioneers and our ability to pioneer is the defining compass by which we measure the worth of our lives. This means that we are also reckless. Since the dawn of time, human beings have been willing to do reckless things in search of their own worthiness and Americans are no different.

Think of a spectrum, with “pioneering" on one side and “recklessness” on the other. Because we are who we are, it is sometimes difficult for us to discern the difference between the two, these modes being the fretful human impulses that are part of the same wavelength within our soul.

As an example, think of the 1958 hit TV show The Rifleman — a good and noble farmer former Union soldier who, as a single father protects his ranch and his town in the name of goodness — and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs — which is a dark and morbid depiction of the Western frontier, full of greed, “machismo and homicide.” These are both true and accurate portrayals of the wild, wild west.

You see? We are pioneering and we are reckless.

And now, it is we — the land of the free — who must find a way to take these two impulses and balance them inside ourselves.

This is the challenge of the Corona virus. How will we bend it to our will? This is a rare kind of test that requires neither our ability to conquer territory nor our instinct for industry. It requires that we conquer the hardest thing in the world there is to conquer:

Ourselves.

You must understand: what is being asked of us is, if viewed through a certain lens, antithetical to the spirit of the American mind, and thus of how we conceive of life itself. And this is not a dig, or me making fun; That spirit is part of my blood. I get it. I, too am America.

One of my favorite commercials to watch when I think of the wonder that is America is Levi Jean’s 2009 commercial, “Go Forth” which juxtaposes Walt Whitman’s poem, “Pioneers, O Pioneers” against the backdrop of Americans — old and young, rich and poor, man and woman, rural and city-dweller, — daring to make their way in the world. This innate drive to “go forth”, in the same way that the core is the center of the earth, is what it means to be an American.

And if you think that that Levi Jeans commercial was done merely sacrilegiously for commercial purposes, then you do not understand that our unhealthy fetish for consumerism is also a product of that daring, that longing, that restless need to be trailblazers. We cannot help but “go forth”; To do so is in our bones.

It would be vastly harder, after all to put together a commercial whose selling point is to “sit down and be still.” You would be telling the consumer to stop consuming and since consuming is part of how we interact with and remain interconnected with each other, it would feel to some like you were telling us to stop living.

So now that Corona has come, what Americans want is the assurance, the absolute glorious guarantee, that we will remain interconnected with others even as we silo ourselves off into our living rooms, that we will be able to feel warmth in our nights of terror when we sit and wonder what is going to happen to our jobs and to our livelihoods. Blessed assurance is what we want and the feeling of this is what we are frightened we’ll lose.

Wrapped up in this sense of interconnectedness are our industrious impulse (the need to go to work) and our social impulses (the need to spend leisure time with friends.) So, when some well-meaning liberals berate conservatives for recklessly endangering the lives of others and, lets face it, themselves, by refraining from social distancing, what they fail to understand is that for mammals, social distancing literally feels like death.

I am not exaggerating. Just so you know what is at stake, I met with someone on zoom the other day who told me that someone she knew had committed suicide just a few days earlier. What we are dealing with is a paradigmatic shift that upends the entire idea of Americana, and the sense of freedom that has come to define the meaning of our lives. This is an existential crisis, not just a physical one.

To paint how dire a picture this is, its’ worth considering the following parable.

In the 1998 film Dangerous Beauty, Beatrice Venier, a woman married to a senior statesmen in Venice in the late 1500s, secretly approaches Veronica Franco, a courtesan — which is a highly paid, cultured prostitute — to convince her to train her own daughter to follow in Franco’s footsteps. During that time, women were not allowed in libraries or schools. They were forced to marry for reasons having nothing to do with love or courtship. Matches were selected based on the status or money they would bring to a family; Interclass marriage was strictly prohibited. Franco, having fallen in love with a man she could never marry due to his status, chooses instead to become a courtesan.

But ironically, one of the few freedoms afforded to the courtesans is education. As a result Franco, who’d had an instinct for poetry early on, is allowed certain freedoms that women of financial privilege are not. Franco, aghast at the suggestion that she “pimp her daughter,” shows Venier the macabre reality of what happens when courtesans are no longer favored by the royalty. They are cast out into the poor streets of Venice and turned into the playthings of bums. Surely a mother would never subject her own daughter to the potential of such torture.

“My cage seems bigger than yours, but it’s still a cage,” Franco says.

But Venier’s response is worth considering in light of the challenge America faces today:

“Do you know what my daughter’s nurse told her this morning? That in a girl’s voice lies temptation. A known fact…Promiscuity of the mind leads to promiscuity of the body. She doesn’t believe her yet, but she will. She’ll grow up just like her mother, she’ll marry, bear children, and honor her family…and when she dies, she’ll wonder why she obeyed all the rules of God and country because no biblical hell could ever be worse than this state of perpetual inconsequence.”

The comparison of what is happening today in America to this story is neither tedious nor ham-fisted. This is what people feel when their freedom — however loosely or superficially defined — is tampered with: “That no biblical hell could ever be worse than this state of perpetual inconsequence.”

To toil with a man’s sense of freedom is, especially in the American vision of itself, to toil with his very identity; there will be blood.

How then do we solve this conundrum?

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The political parties are ill equipped to handle this challenge.

Before delving into this fact, I admit I am caricaturing and stereotyping republicans and democrats in this next portion of the essay. I do this for the sake of brevity. I understand that many do not fall into the category of what I am describing, that there are many republicans and conservatives, who, for example, are on the front lines of battling the virus as nurses and doctors and politicians and playing other similar roles. I consider all Americans my fellow Americans regardless of political affiliation or lack thereof and I am rooting for us all.

That being said, Republicans are ill equipped because, having been fooled by the Prosperity Gospel which is rooted in some well-meaning-but-somewhat-dehumanizing aspects of the Protestant Work Ethic, which equates material accumulation with spiritual salvation, the party of Lincoln and of Reagan, (see, pioneering and reckless, ha) has been confusing wealth with moral virtue.

When accumulation of wealth is perceived as a moral virtue, working to make goods is not merely an economic act but a spiritual one. This is a matter of life and death since it is a matter of being and feeling and knowing that you are useful.

If you combine this with a human being’s basic need to feel like they are progressing in some way — and this is an instinct that transcends borders — you will have a difficult time when Corona virus comes to town.

Dr. King’s teaching that, “if a man doesn’t have a job or an income, he has neither life nor liberty nor the possibility for the pursuit of happiness. He merely exists,” is relevant here.

A man cannot stand to merely exist. If he comes home without putting food on the table for his wife and daughters, he is shamed, cast out, and feels worthless, Not being able to go to work, then, is a certain kind of hell.

All human beings are capable of suffering from worthlessness regardless of their class or gender or station.

Consider the remarks of W.E.B. Dubois who once commented on the deep lifelessness that existed not in a laborer in the mines coming home to feed his family but in a plantation owner who trafficked in bone and sinew for the price of sugar and cotton. It is only the man who in deep and deadly irony feels that he is a worthless prick that has the gall to do such a thing.

The slave, in contrast, Dubois argued, was, in a way, more free, since “he was not easily bought to recognize any ethical sanctions in work as such but tended to work as the results pleased him and refused to work…when he did not find the spiritual returns adequate.[emphasis: mine].”

What is at play here, then, is a different conception of spirituality than that embedded in the idea that material wealth — and the processes required to obtain that wealth — connotes freedom. Though the slave was physically shackled, she was capable of being spiritually free. This redemptive quality of her culture permeated everything she created: her music, her literature, her poetry, her art. Thus was the African-American tradition born. And just like old westerns and apple pie, this ability to keep the spirit alive even while the physical body is shackled is deeply and profoundly American.

The Republican does not understand that though physical work is important, it is not everything. The president is merely a reflection of the fraud achieved by confusing the two.

And as for the Democrats: they have, in large part, forgotten the place that spirituality plays in the role of the citizenry. Having seen the concept of God bastardized by false prophets, they decided, in more deep and deadly irony, to act as if the only thing that exists or that matters in life, is the material. This is why they foolishly believe that people are refraining from self-distancing because they want to sacrifice elderly people on the altar of the Dow Jones.

In the name of what spiritual practice do democrats declare such a sacrifice to be immoral? It is a spiritual instinct, forged and flamed by the fiery furnace of our Western tradition that has allowed them to come to such a conclusion. Else, what is the acknowledgement of the dignity of human beings grounded in?

To deny the importance of a spiritual vocabulary that addresses the needs and hunger of the people is to deny the possibility of social justice, which I believe means a socially-minded justice oriented towards the welfare of the people, who are spiritual.

The Democrats’ failure to condemn the hyper commodification of our societies, a plague that has atomized us and zapped us of our spiritual fervency, lies in their refusal to acknowledge the very presence of that spirituality. Instead we are stuck with politicians who are obsessed with material dialectics when what the people really need is to dance.

We are stuck with people who are really good at making charts when what is needed is orators who will carry the people to their higher selves. This is what we have all been in search for after all, and we will make so many mistakes, and blaze so many trails, some heartbreaking, some deadly, some redemptive, in pursuit of this, alone.

We will equate money will salvation. We will free slaves, both externally and those within us. We commit sins and we behave mercifully all to feel a higher sense of purpose, to feel that we matter.

There’s no way you can possibly understand this if you think that all there is to life is the material.

So the right has misdefined the divine; the left has denied its existence.

What a time to be alive. The challenge of corona is our defining moment, and is presenting us with a brand new frontier we now get to pioneer; Our task is nothing less than the reconciliation of the nation.

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Lo & Behold: The solution lies in our pioneering spirit.

But this is a kind of pioneering that is immaterial. It is not concerned with the accumulation of goods but of internal striving; it is not rooted in a zero-sum perception of life but in the belief that life is abundant and ever renewed by how we chose to greet the day, by how we choose to make something out of the situations we’ve been given, mucky though they may be.

This, as I said, is the hardest pioneering we will ever have to subject ourselves to, as a nation. It is a character building exercise, a mental expedition, and it requires that our sense of voyage turn inward, that we discover the New World — ourselves — which have been rotting away under the insufferable task of always needing to produce commodities.

But though this is hard, we are up to the task not in spite of the fact but because we are American. This tradition, this different kind of pioneering is also in our blood.

Consider Henry David Thoreau, our great essayist and poet, who showed us how to do this in Walden:

“Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth…However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest…. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse.”

Love your life, even while you are stuck inside. Love your life, even though you cannot see your friends right now. Love your life, even though you must skip the wedding for now. Love your life, even though you cannot be at your father’s funeral; this is a hard thing to do but I told you this would be one of the hardest things you’ve ever done. Love your life, even if you’re enslaved. Because then you will come to notice the preciousness of it, since you will no longer be distracted with fickle things.

If you do this, you will discover a gift: The ability to give thanks in turbulent times. Those who know how to give thanks in moments of terror and chaos are the owners of a peace of mind that money cannot buy.

When college kids sat at Woolworth’s segregated lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina to protest Jim Crow through nonviolence, they were architects of a kind of spiritual revolution rooted in that same peace of mind. Though they were physically met with violence and though their bodies were battered and bruised, they kept their spirits in tact. To get into such a state, they practiced being beaten up by their peers and studied Stoic teachings. They used meditation and mindfulness to train their hearts and bodies.

The goal of this exercise was not to break down and start fighting back but to maintain a discipline of the psyche, a kind of self-governance, which was after all, a principle aim of the Founders’ vision.

Yet again, we are being called upon to practice what we preach.

We can draw from our rich tradition, our great Americana, we can take on this new quest boldly, brazenly, with the same feverish abandon we’ve dedicated to noble projects of the past. This will require that we start to practice being still by practicing meditation; that we study stoicism and other foundational texts in the Western canon on the meaning of life; that we come together to dance on a regular basis; if we do all these things, perhaps we will discover a deeper meaning of freedom.

We were made to wander because we were made to wonder. Now we must turn our gaze inward into the wonder of ourselves. It is only when we decide, from sea to shining sea, to be still that we will have finally earned the right to be called Americans.

Go forth.