The Place Where You Fall Down

When I first thought of doing another newsletter, I imagined it would be about climate despair and my attempts to alleviate my own, a reporting of what did (or more likely, didn’t) work. Since no internal experience is unique or original, I knew other people must be feeling the way I was: crushingly isolated and alone in their consuming dread. I was not optimistic that I’d find methods of mitigating the pain but the regular confirmation of I’m feeling it, too, seemed like it might do some good. The absence of acknowledgement in social interactions and the culture at large made me feel insane.

I enrolled in a Plum Village course about climate anxiety and found that even before it started, being in the implied company of others in a similar state helped a lot. It calmed me down, made me feel like something right was happening. The tone of the preparatory communications reflected the demeanor of the monastics, who are honest without being corny and positive without being denialist. It was powerful.

One of the first topics was the question of how to reconcile the need for meditation, introspection, and other practices of self-attention with the need for urgent action in the world and the necessity of being outwardly focused. Isn’t this self indulgent? Isn’t this negligent? “It is my conviction that we cannot change the world if we are not capable of changing our way of thinking, our consciousness,” Thich Nhat Hanh says in a video response to a question along these lines. “That is why collective awakening, a collective change in our way of seeing things, is very crucial. And all of us can help promote that. Our task is to come together to try to produce that type of collective awakening. Otherwise we cannot expect the world to change.”

A lot of the discourse in the past two weeks about Palestine and Israel has come to me secondhand. The Zionist mantra of “your Jewish friends see you,” for instance, I knew was circulating but no one ever addressed to me, though I would have been happy to have that exchange since at least half of what I was thinking, have been thinking, and what I was sharing, am sharing, is from Jewish friends and peers, activists and intellectuals. One positive of recent days, which I have noticed with regularity and gratitude, is the clarity and righteousness of people I look to for political education and moral reassurance. Never before have I felt such faith in and love for those I’ve surrounded myself with in “real life” and online. They have been key figures in my awakening and I hope I’ve supported theirs as well. I’ve felt disappointment, too, and fury at the public display of others, but I’ve not been let down by anyone I call a friend. And when I brought my disappointment and disillusionment to those I trust, they helped me hold it.

A tired perversion of self-care has similarly been in the ether: trite TikToks about logging off, exhortations to relax into ignorance, calls for murderous silence and contemptuous intimations that no one could possibly know enough to speak unless—funny how that works—they have intimate ties and allegiance to either Israel or the U.S. I think it’s clear that most of this was not advocated in good faith, that it comes from people who want to preserve the status quo and exonerate their complicity by recasting inaction as the result of too much empathy rather than none at all.

But it also was apparent to me that people who care quite a lot were struggling and sometimes creating more suffering in the process, either for themselves or for people they lashed out at. I noticed the pull in myself toward patterns that aren’t necessarily destructive but are definitely unhelpful and designed to paper over whatever I’m feeling. (They give themselves away by their panicked, compulsive quality.) It seems to me that the Palestinian genocide and climate collapse are both overwhelming realities that can make you feel so powerless that it feels pointless to do anything at all. They can make the world feel irredeemable, beyond hope, too hateful and corrupt to be improved. And it is a shame I’ve seen so little mention of what might actually help, in a true way, to keep those feelings from immobilizing us.

I think a lot about Thay saying, “we already have more than enough suffering; we don’t need to create any more.” It seems irrefutable to me. I’d like to be able to live accordingly, not by turning away from videos of the wounded children who are the sole surviving member of their families but by taking it in and responding in a way that has a chance of honoring and protecting them. You don’t exempt yourself from suffering by pledging not to create more. Rather, you take intentional responsibility for the suffering that is already there, because there’s plenty of it. “We have to find a way to face our suffering and transform it into happiness and compassion,” Thay writes, “just as we use the place where we fall to help us stand up.”

I don’t see myself as a superior being with all (or any) answers so I’m not speaking to you that way. I don’t presume to tell anyone what they should or shouldn’t feel. When I come across some heinous, amoral take, I’ll lay an expletive-laden curse on its author almost every time, something like, “I hope he chokes to death on his own dick.” I am constantly thinking of almost every politician, oh please let today be the day. That’s not very Plum Village of me. Meditation and mindful breathing are really hard and I’m terrible at them. They’re not intuitive, and they can be interesting but rarely fun. The good news is, that’s true for everyone. Sister True Dedication tells a story about overhearing someone praise the act of taking ten breaths without having a thought, and her confidence that it would be easy for her, since she’s already practiced. But it took her months, and a lot of concentration and patience, to master. You can try it yourself now; it’s a weirdly appealing challenge. Just breathe in and out ten times without a thought. If at any point you have a thought, you have to start over. I think the furthest I’ve gotten, if I’m being completely honest about what counts as a thought, is two, maybe one and half. But everyone has to start where they are, warts (aka wishes for dick-choking deaths) and all.

Thich Nhat Hanh is always writing things like, you have to come home to yourself and to your suffering, you can’t cover it up with music or books or games. You have to breathe in and say “Hello, my fear, my anger, my despair. I will take good care of you.” Whenever he models this, this talking to the negative emotions in a kind and loving way, I get tears in my eyes. It makes me realize how hard I work to ignore these things in me, to delegitimize them or pretend they don’t exist. I can imagine someone getting really angry at my making the suggestion that you or I might need to take care of our suffering right now, because it comes from within a context of white women recasting self-absorption as so beneficial that it can and should take the place of being a decent human being. But the suggestion doesn’t come from me, it comes from a Vietnamese activist who used his mediation practice to help refugees in real, concrete ways; who lost brother and sister monastics to self-immolation in protest of the war; who was exiled from his home for half of his life. I’m passing it along and I apologize if I’m doing it poorly. There are hundreds of books and podcasts and videos that won’t come with my clumsy interference and I truly believe they will give you some measure of relief.

The immediate demands from Gaza are currently, as far as I know, Ceasefire Now; End the Siege; No “Evacuation” of Gazans from their home; End US Military Aid; and Send Delegations to Gaza. The actions requested of all people of conscience are to protest and contact elected officials; talk about Palestine to inform those around you; boycott businesses and pressure institutions. I really liked what Ashtin Berry said about political action that is rigorous rather than exhaustive; it’s succinct and easy to understand. I promise you have time to try the ten breaths. I’ll be trying it, too.