Vicissitudes.
I’ve always loved that word. It seems onomatopoeic. You can hear the ups and downs of change and variation in there, and the pain of all that jolting. Just when things are going so…this other thing comes along. It does make sense that we’re so heavily wired for safety and security, and are therefore resistant to change and the challenges it brings. Because survival, right? Be safe, be secure, keep things the same, survive.
Ah, but life doesn’t cooperate with that instinct. It’s right there in the definition of vicissitude in the American Heritage Dictionary: “the quality of being changeable; mutability.”
One choice when the deep drive to be safe and secure meets up with the mutability of all of life is just to say, “F— it, I don’t care,” but the damn thing is, if you’re human, you cannot help caring. And that’s one of life’s massive conundrums.
My inner human raged: “Of course you care. You care deeply. You want this to work.” But caring was killing me. And in an endeavor that’s about developing composure and equanimity, it didn’t make a lot of sense.
When we started Mindful magazine and mindful.org, I didn’t want to do it. I thought it was crazy to start a magazine in the internet age (and many others agreed). People protested. “You folks need to do this. Someone will do it, and it shouldn’t be Martha Stewart. She knows nothing about mindfulness.” My arm was twisted right into doing it, along with several others as foolish as I was. It was so very complicated and so very hard. I’d worked on magazines all
my adult life. I loved them, but I was never in charge. Each issue has hundreds of little and big elements, and the little ones are as hard as the big ones, and the people who work in this world tend toward perfectionism, and there are lots of opinions. To hold the stress at bay, I told myself I didn’t care if it worked out.
But my inner human raged: “Of course you care. You care deeply. You want this to work.” But caring was killing me. And in an endeavor that’s about developing composure and equanimity, it didn’t make a lot of sense.
It was hard for me to accept that caring, such a good thing, could lead to crippling levels of anxiety and stress, and there is so much to care about beyond just doing a good job: people you love deeply, your health, and then the big things like equality, justice, the environment, and on and on. Since we can’t not care, and yet caring can kill us, we have to find a way to strike a balance: learning how to love and care without caring yourself to death. That’s the art. And it requires a child-at-play, naïve, que será será attitude that is nevertheless anything but cold and uncaring. This paradox of caring deeply while being carefree at the same time takes skill, and while mindfulness practice is not a magic wand to confer that skill, it can be a huge help.
I have to admit that it took me long years to cultivate some equanimity in the midst of Mindful’s evolution. Amid a storm of vicissitudes, I doubted and regretted deeply. I do not now. It has been a great teacher. Like they say about meditation, the point is not to do it right but rather to learn from the process. You start where you are and you go back to where you are.
When caring veers into controlling, that’s when a dose of carefree ease can make all the difference.
One big thing my “teacher” taught me was how brutal the fruits of expectations can be. With a meditation student or my daughters or staff or volunteers, I was eager to get someplace and accomplish big things, and that translated into visualizing precise outcomes and pouring all my energy in trying to bring those about, imposing that on others while burning myself out. (And that wreaks havoc on the whole role model thing. Who wants to emulate someone who drives themselves into the ground with stress?) I was trying to make what was uncertain—the future—certain. I learned the hard way how that just does not work.
At my low ebb, mindfulness helped me learn that effective caring begins with paying attention to what’s happening now and letting the results emerge as byproducts of caring in the present tense. When caring veers into controlling, that’s when a dose of carefree ease can make all the difference. A smile of appreciation at whatever happens goes much further than a grimace of withering judgment and disappointment.
Joy Emerges of Its Own Accord
Somehow, ironically, being carefree doesn’t mean not caring. In other words, not maintaining a laser focus on outcomes and expectations doesn’t mean we don’t care about whether we or
others do well. It’s how we get there that counts, and that’s a skill to develop, not something that just happens. Ed Hanczaryk knows a lot about this skill. A golf pro who employs mindfulness techniques in his instruction, he believes how we approach recreational life affects how we approach life at large. He celebrates a balancing act that combines intensity and ease, summarized as “Focus, Let go.” With mindful awareness, he suggests, we can see that “We create the world moment by moment: so fast that reality appears unbroken, linear. As with a movie projector, the flickering static images appear to move, creating a story.” When we become self-involved, we cling to this story. If, instead, our focus can land on the activity itself, the story we’re telling ourselves can be let go. When athletes perform at a high level, he says, “They’re so engaged and so trusting of their abilities, they’re not separate from the activity.” Joy emerges of its own accord.
Echoing this point, Mark Campbell—a performance coach who is also director of mental conditioning for the Washington Nationals—emphasizes that caring is what gets us into the game, because we do well when we care about something. Then, once we’re in the game, mindfulness can help us stay in, safely. “Passion drives people to be great and to continue moving forward during tough times. Caring is an amazing power, but it comes with responsibility—mostly to yourself. Learning to manage your self-care is important, refilling your tank regularly to have more of what you need when you need it.”
“Passion drives people to be great and to continue moving forward during tough times. Caring is an amazing power, but it comes with responsibility—mostly to yourself. Learning to manage your self-care is important, refilling your tank regularly to have more of what you need when you need it.”
Mark Campbell
Director of mental conditioning, Washington Nationals baseball team
Like other people in helping professions, Andrés Gonzalez of the Holistic Life Foundation, in Baltimore, says he finds it helpful to remember an adage that allows “me to be true to myself: You can’t keep setting yourself on fire to keep others warm.”Ashanti Branch, who like Andrés works with young people in urban schools, in Oakland, says that he cares “by not getting too attached” to a particular outcome, remembering a saying from an early mindfulness retreat: “No aversions. No cravings.” C