Pandemic mode, episode 9

Today marks the end of my news fast-- or at least when I planned to end it. After a glorious two weeks without checking the NY Times, watching CNN at work, or clicking on news articles I didn't have to read, I'm considering stretching the fast out to a month... maybe even six weeks, though that might be stretching it. Then again, it may not be. The last couple weeks have been fabulous. 

After two months of digging, weeding, mulching, and planting, Mindy and I finally reached a rare confluence this week of beautiful weather, no work, and no urgent chores or errands. Undistracted by the news, I discovered the headspace to fully enjoy all sorts of activities and to be more present with Mindy, Eliza, and our friends. The siren call of the smartphone was noticeably less alluring without another Trump bashing or COVID-19 analysis on tap. It certainly helped that we went on a couple hikes and an impromptu excursion to the river-- Eliza's first float trip (all 100 feet of it)! Though she had a major meltdown on one of our hikes, we still managed to have a great time hiking the Viaduct area with the Hogan's and exploring my friend Doug's beautiful new trail up Rich Mountain on the back side of Moses Cone Park. 

Another key: my knee stopped hurting. I was even able to bike 15 miles this morning without a twinge! And it was an absolutely perfect spring day, with rays of morning sunlight filtering through the budding trees, brooks babbling, flowers bursting, birds singing and winging, and the mountain air perfectly cool and clear. I couldn't think of a better way or place to spend a morning.

Though I've hardly read a news article this month, I've still been able to stay superficially current on major events, by way of conversation, podcasts, a few articles texted to me, and overheard snippets of TV. But the greatest unlooked-for discovery has definitely been the pleasing absence of Donald Trump from my life. Like the orb of a demiurge, his glowing, orange presence has so overtaken our news media that the everyday waking consciousness of Americans has been transformed into his image. Many of us are now as defined by outrage, division, disgust, vitriol, and a reckless disregard for truth as the Donald himself. And I imagine that even those who dimly realize the danger can scarcely imagine an offramp to such madness. 

But I'm here to tell you, it starts with something quite simple:

Unplug.

Pandemic mode, episode 8

This editorial in The Atlantic is so good, I will risk coming across as a conduit of other people's opinions to share it with you all. Please read. Thanks to Sam Cox for sharing it with me. It makes just about all of the points I would want to make this week, and then some. 

But what it doesn't delve into is the answer to the deep question Sam raised with me and another good friend Nick Sailer, which is, how do we become good citizens?

In recognition of the start of the ninth week under the cloud of this pandemic, I will attempt to answer this question with reflections on nine quotes I hold dear to my heart:

Quotes 1-3 theme: We must step off the hamster wheel and engage in inner work that results in deep transformation.

1. We live in a machine that is designed to get us to neglect what is important in life. 
-Tim Kasser

This is why I haven't been on social media for 2.5 years and why I am in the midst of a news fast. The tiny hits of dopamine we get from social media, advertising, and most television diverts our precious time, attention, and energy into frivolity. 

2. The farther the outward journey takes you, the deeper the inward journey must be. Only when your roots are deep can your fruits be abundant.

-Henri Nouwen

This is the message of Father Richard Rohr and his Center for Action and Contemplation. That name says it all: we must be transformed by contemplation if we are to have any hope of transforming the world without becoming conformed to its ways.

3. For if one knows himself, he will know God.

-Clement of Alexandria, quoted by Carl Jung

Christians tend to think of God as other, completely neglecting the transformative idea that God is not separate from us-- that we are God's vessels, embodiments of the divine with incredible potential for good.

Quotes 4-6 theme: We must use the clarity we obtain from inner work to make changes in our own life that will feed our continued evolution.

4. Every day of our lives, we are on the verge of making those slight changes that would make all the difference.” -Mignon McLaughlin 

Even if this sounds cliche, it's nevertheless a deep truth. With the clarity achieved from contemplation, we are more likely to see the right path to take amidst the fog of everyday life. And if we choose the right force multipliers, the benefits to us and the world will start exponentially accruing, activating a virtuous cycle. Check out your nearest bookstore to read all about the power of habit, atomic habits, etc. But don't forget to actually apply some of it to your life!

5. Beware the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world. - Ben Okri

This idea grows out of the work of Carl Jung, who has deeply influenced me over the last 9 months. Every memory we make and action we take is imprinted into our brain. Anatomically, this process consists of forging new synapses, reinforcing established ones, and altering neurochemical and receptor makeup. But psychologically, it consists of creating memories which eventually become partially forgotten or repressed, but whose signature remains, and returns to us in obsessions, compulsions, anxieties, and dreams-- the stories our brains create out of the raw material of our experiences. Few things imprint our neurology as deeply as narrative, whether the stories we tell about ourselves, others, or the stories others tell. Our lives, and the entire course of human history, turn on the stories we tell.

6. It seems to me what is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas. Obviously those two modes of thought are in some tension. But if you are able to exercise only one of these modes, whichever one it is, you’re in deep trouble. If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you. You never learn anything new. You become a crotchety old person convinced that nonsense is ruling the world. But every now and then, maybe once in a hundred cases, a new idea turns out to be on the mark, valid and wonderful. If you are too much in the habit of being skeptical about everything, you are going to miss or resent it, and either way you will be standing in the way of understanding and progress. On the other hand, if you are open to the point of gullibility and have not an ounce of skeptical sense in you, then you cannot distinguish the useful ideas from the worthless ones. If all ideas have equal validity then you are lost, because then, it seems to me, no ideas have any validity at all. Some ideas are better than others. The machinery for distinguishing them is an essential tool in dealing with the world and especially in dealing with the future. And it is precisely the mix of these two modes of thought that is central to the success of science." -Carl Sagan

An essential aspect of the evolution of our minds is the development of a sophisticated web of mental models that work together to separate truth from fiction. We need a well-calibrated "Belief Bouncer" to keep us on the right track, out of ideological echo chambers, and open to true revelation.

Quotes 7-9 theme: We must not wait for a perfect opportunity to arise, but instead engage in thoughtful action wherever we are.

7. The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves and wise people so full of doubts.” -Bertrand Russell

Doubt and error are unavoidable, recurring stages in everyone's journey. But we must not let that prevent us from acting out of core convictions that have been honed by habitual reflection. As Brett McKay likes to put it, "Get Action." The flip side of this, of course, is that fools reliably fall prey to the Dunning-Kruger effect, overestimating their ability and making other people's lives worse-- cf Jared Kushner.

8. We want to have certainties and no doubt — results and no experiments — without even seeing that certainties can arise only through doubt and results only through experiment. -Carl Jung

Like Steve Jobs liked to say, it takes a lot of hard work to make things simple, whether that's an object like the iPhone or the way one thinks about a particular topic. But we should always try to maintain the mindset of a scientist in our search for truth, and not be distracted by our primitive need for security, certainty, and comfort.

9. Knowledge is only potential power. It becomes power only when, and if, it is organized into definite plans of action. -Napoleon Hill

Part of what makes us human is our ability to plan. And the better planner a person is, the more awesome their life generally becomes. Conversely, those who live only for the moment mostly end in ruin. Just read Proverbs! But occasionally, they still end up as president of the United States-- so we're also subject to good fortune and bad luck! Just read Job! Nevertheless, our obligation-- and the only rational course of action-- is to accumulate AND APPLY as much knowledge as possible. 

Well, it seems impossible for me to get through a blog post without highlighting at least one of Trump's endless faults. But I hope that these reflections have helped calibrate you all to a deeper perspective, beyond the perturbations of the daily news cycle-- one that is defined by gratitude, humility, wisdom, self-knowledge, and conviction. And on this Mother's Day, may you find time to truly appreciate and enjoy the one(s) who have given the most to help you reach that pinnacle of human development.

Be well.

Pandemic mode, episode 7

The best thing I read this week was one of today's Op-Eds in the New York Times. It only takes a few minutes to read, so please check it out. It's a fitting last bit of news media for me before I start a 2-week news fast tomorrow. In case you don't have time to read it, I'll quote a few paragraphs that particularly struck me: 

     “This is history right in front of us,” Garrett said. “Did we go ‘back to normal’ after 9/11? No. We created a whole new normal. We securitized the United States. We turned into an antiterror state. And it affected everything. We couldn’t go into a building without showing ID and walking through a metal detector, and couldn’t get on airplanes the same way ever again. That’s what’s going to happen with this.” 

     Not the metal detectors, but a seismic shift in what we expect, in what we endure, in how we adapt. 

     Maybe in political engagement, too, Garrett said.

     If America enters the next wave of coronavirus infections “with the wealthy having gotten somehow wealthier off this pandemic by hedging, by shorting, by doing all the nasty things that they do, and we come out of our rabbit holes and realize, ‘Oh, my God, it’s not just that everyone I love is unemployed or underemployed and can’t make their maintenance or their mortgage payments or their rent payments, but now all of a sudden those jerks that were flying around in private helicopters are now flying on private personal jets and they own an island that they go to and they don’t care whether or not our streets are safe,’ then I think we could have massive political disruption.”

     “Just as we come out of our holes and see what 25 percent unemployment looks like,” she said, “we may also see what collective rage looks like.”

This is the kind of shift I am attempting to think through in this blog series. Though each week's news items can be important, I'm much more interested in the seismic activity happening miles below society's surface than the direction of each day's political wind.

We're all trying to see the silver lining to this crisis, and that's good and necessary. But as a society, we aren't giving enough thought to what the worst-case scenarios are over the next few years, and what we should be doing now to both prevent and prepare for them.

Getting "back to normal" is a fantasy, as the editorial indicates. Sure, most people will eventually be able to go back to work, although local disease transmission will ramp up at various points over the next couple years and we'll have to close down shop again. Each time we have to do that, damage will accumulate-- and not just economic damage, either. The societal changes that will result will be with us for a very long time.

For one, the ever-deepening tribalism defining left versus right, cosmopolitan versus parochial, secular versus fundamentalist, will deepen, just when it seemed we couldn't become any more fractured. Brother will turn against brother and father turn against son. Violence-- especially gun violence-- will continue to increase. And more and more walls will keep going up.

Donald Trump ("the most incompetent, foolhardy buffoon imaginable") completely lacks the cognitive flexibility to adapt to this novel, very unusual reality. Unfortunately, he's surrounded himself with like-minded egotistical sycophants. So I have exactly no hope that the federal government will take any significant appropriate action until at least January 2021. And this reality has magnified what would have otherwise been a manageable problem.

That problem is that many people cling to the hope that everything will just go back to the way it was in a couple months or a couple years. And Donald Trump has fed that fantasy until it seems like an inevitable reality to the people he holds under his sway. Just around the corner, very soon, we'll have all the testing we'll need, a vaccine, a magical cure. Heck, it might already be in every household's cleaning closet, just waiting to be discovered by Trump's "very stable genius."

I reiterate: there are no easy outs, no deus ex machina, no going back to the way things were. 

Take it from me: I live in a county where there has still been no local coronavirus transmission. And after two months, it's tempting to believe that Watauga County is somehow exempt from the epidemiological reality of the rest of the world. But it's not. COVID-19 is coming for us, too-- it's just taking longer to get here. 

The pandemic is becoming, in many ways, a war of attrition. The most mentally strong individuals, groups, communities, states, and nations will weather the storm the best. Wartime nations like South Korea, Israel, and Taiwan are killing it because they are not operating under the decadent nostrum that everything you want is just a click and a 2-day wait away. Important, meaningful, and necessary things take time, effort, perseverance, grit, resolve, and patience. You must constantly be strengthening your spirit with solitude and discomfort, and feeding your soul with silence and love if you are going to be able to resist the siren call-- the desire to go "back to normal," in this case. 

Weak-willed and feeble-minded hordes are already storming the gates to make everything normal again, to make America great again... again. We are undergoing a national stress test in which the real women and men are being separated from the girls and boys. So if you're wavering, tempted to believe this all has been an uncomfortable dream we're about to wake up from-- don't. Push through the denial and bargaining stages of grief. If you're despairing, do what you need to do to find solace. If you're angry, dig into that feeling until you come out the other side. Beyond all that lies acceptance: not passive acceptance, mind you, but the aequinimitas of the enlightened sage that recognizes the things one can't change while maintaining the wisdom, strength, and will to change the things one can.

No matter who or where you are, there are plenty of things you can and should do. So do them.

Keep love alive. And stay strong. We have a very long road ahead of us.