Do it Anyway — Even if You Don’t Feel Like it
What’s important and what we do will define our story, not how we feel as we live it.
The building where I worked had an old HVAC system that was loud and effortful and faulty. Twice yearly in each extreme season I’d hear it grinding, moaning to a fully, broken-down stop in the midst of a client meeting. And then the building would be silent — oppressively, embarrassingly silent. No ambient noise to help buffer my existence. You don’t realize how you lean on those micro-distractions until you lose them. While continuing on with the meeting, not missing a perceptible beat, underneath the surface, I’d feel a small, vivid rush of apology-thoughts for being loud, taking up their time, bothering them with my ideas, existing at all. My old stuff so eager to fill in the silence. I’d notice it, shoo it and bring myself back to the conversation someone was paying me to have.
When the pandemic shut-down occurred, I kept hearing that noise in my head as if the whole country and all the lives in it were a giant machine grinding, moaning to a broken-down stop. And there we were caught in the silence. My stuff showed up dutifully with dread-thoughts of X’s marked on houses the virus had entered, becoming feral and bedraggled as we cloistered and feared each other. Anxiety gathered quickly and in large scale. I couldn’t eat or sleep. But somehow went through the motions of daily living. In the last day or so before the Bam-Bam-Wooooooooommssshh of the economy’s engine sputtering to its dramatic halt we all could feel it coming. I know because standing in the line at the Kroger, a line much longer for a Thursday afternoon than any other time, I could feel in my body the choking fear that was beyond mine. I began to sweat and my breath became shallow. My vision was threatening to tunnel-in. It was out of scale to the already sufficient anxiety I was hauling around the store. I looked around at all the pleasant, placid Ohio faces and saw no trace of what I felt in my lungs and throat and gut. For a moment, I thought I was having a panic attack but I, like everyone, went through the motions of an ordinary grocery trip, tossing forced pleasantries to the cashier. When I left the store, I could breathe again. No one would have known what was threatening to overcome me in those moments at the check-out: my own anxiety swirling together with the anxiety of all those around me rising in my body like a demagorgon or a choking, malicious ghost.
The anxiety has abated or maybe just given way to what feels more like a depression. Two months into this pandemic shut-down and sadness is a feeling I wake up with most days and go to sleep with every day. In between, I do what I have to do. Take care of the kids, help them with school, cook food and clean up after it (usually.) Some days I give the sadness a lot of attention. On those days I stare a lot, because sadness and its script are fairly compelling. Can’t do much else if thats what I’m paying attention to. On other days, I go through more motions. I might exercise a little, go for more than one walk, actually fold the laundry. I pay attention to the actions that need to be taken. These days, I find, are better days. Perhaps these days are days that are born with more space in them or more energy. Maybe because I slept better or ate a healthier breakfast, who knows? But on these days I try to notice the formula — the optimal combination of habits that results in a more spacious and peaceful inner state.
This formula is actually quite important. It points the way, not to salvation or perfection, but to self-efficacy, the sense that I am capable of making meaningful things happen for me. The scale of what’s meaningful for me and for a lot of us has shrunken down in these pandemic times, kind of hard to recognize. I don’t know about you but I’ve been challenged as much by valuing the tasks of daily living as i’ve been challenged by the loss of freedom. I have a lot of grief for both my sense of freedom AND the future I assumed would unfold. But grief is not a value. It’s a feeling and an inner experience that comes and grows and swells and shrinks and eventually fades. I can be aware of it being there but on the days I give it all my attention, it — greedy as sadnesses are — will also take my energy and my time. So the practice is to pay attention to actions because it’s in actions that the shape of a life is defined.
If our actions are guided by what’s meaningful to us, by what’s uniquely valued then the shape the life takes points toward happiness. It doesn’t buy you a ticket but it reveals the path, a crooked overgrown path at times. I know this. The formula for me is to eat lots of green vegetables, get outside, practice being a little more present than comes automatically, move more than my mind says it wants to, read for pleasure, listen to music, reach out to people. Most days these actions don’t flow out of me propelled by inspiration. I don’t always feel like going outside or eating vegetables. So they are simply actions I can take. Some days taking these actions feels onerous and forced like the pleasantries given the cashier in the midst of a panic attack. If you noticed in that part of the narrative, all of us in the store were going through the motions despite the anxiety overwhelming us. We were putting on the pleasant Ohio face, getting the groceries, thanking the cashier, all because being pleasant is important to us here in Ohio. So, I try to follow through with the habits of my formula anyway. Even now. Because feeling physically healthy, being There for my family, feeling connected to earth and the people I care about and feeding my imagination are all values for me. I want my life — even my pandemic life — to be shaped by them to the best of my ability. This has to be possible. And perhaps those simple actions point the way, even now. In the least they define a day I feel better about than those spent staring.
One last thing: Those days spent staring aren’t meaningless. Because one of the main values I want to help define my life is Compassion. And the more I have for myself, the deeper will be my compassion for others. So on those days and about those days when the grief and sadness have taken up all my attention, when I stare a lot and fail a lot with my kids, I practice letting that be. That is the action I can take. Like a loving grandma watching from the bedroom door. Poor, poor grieving me, you just sleep for now and have those feelings. Get up in the morning and take a walk, eat a warm breakfast and take your time. Tomorrow will be a better day.
