HOW DO WE NAVIGATE THE overall unruliness of life, so filled as it is with urgencies—tasks left undone, friends who need help, health problems, financial pressures, family crises, community crises, world crises? How do we sustain ourselves, our sanity, our open hearts and clear vision in the face of these ongoing challenges? In Buddhist psychology, the answer is equanimity.
When I think of equanimity, I turn to the Pali word upekkha, which is most effectively translated as balance, often the balance born from wisdom. For some, the word equanimity implies coolness, indifference, or even fear masquerading as being “just fine.” A teenager shrugging and saying, “Whatever,” is a perfect example of that particular impression of equanimity. It feels mean, doesn’t it, as you’re trying to offer care or help, to be met with a “Whatever”?
Another idea that people presume for the meaning of equanimity is passivity. In that view, if you approach bad things with equanimity, maybe you’re just a doormat being walked on or a dry leaf asking to be blown about by the winds of change.
The word balance itself can also be misunderstood. Sometimes it’s dismissed as a forced or constrained state achieved through valiantly propping something up (like cheerfulness) while simultaneously pushing something else down (like sorrow). Or holding both pleasure and pain in a tight fist, hoping the pain doesn’t leap out of your hand to take over. Balance is readily seen as mediocrity, something bland, a series of concessions that takes you to the lowest common denominator.
A few years ago, I was in a marketing meeting related to a program I was involved in at the Garrison Institute. For four years, we had offered yoga and meditation as resilience skills for frontline workers in domestic violence shelters. At that point, the program was exploring expanding that skills training to international humanitarian aid workers, which required rewriting all of the material, so we gathered to talk about how to do that.
I tried to explain the changes I had seen the frontline workers go through during the program, and I found myself apologizing: “I know it’s not an exciting word or a compelling word—it can easily sound kind of boring—but an enormous benefit described by them was an increase in balance.”
At that point, every one of the marketing team members laughed. “You know who really likes the word balance?” one of them asked. “Anyone who feels out of balance. That’s a lot of people!”
THE KIND OF balance I’m talking about is not a measurement of how much time you spend doing one thing and then another, trying to create equality between them. Instead, it has to do with having perspective on life, and the effort you’re putting out, and the changes you’re going through. We establish this sense of balance within. It demands of us wisdom, and it gives us a growing sense of peace.
Balance doesn’t come from wiping out all feeling. We don’t have many models for navigating strong emotions in a more balanced way. It’s an uncommon trait. Many of us are conditioned toward extremes. When it comes to feeling painful emotions like anger, we may get lost in them, such that they become toxic and seemingly inescapable. We may think there’s no way out, and we come to identify with our feelings completely: I’m an angry person, and I always will be.
On the other hand, we may tend to feel an impulse to turn away from tough feelings—to swallow them, deny them, distract ourselves. Whether we’re drowning in these painful emotions or pushing them away, it’s still putting pain on top of pain.
Equanimity is what frees us from these dynamics; we can learn to be present with emotions without falling into the extremes of overwhelm or denial. Equanimity is the state in which we can recognize an emotion like anger—and even feel its full intensity—but also pay attention to choosing how we will respond to a given feeling, thought, or circumstance.
One of my favorite illustrations of this phenomenon comes from Andrés Gonzaléz of the Holistic Life Foundation, whom we first met in chapter 3. He told me the story of eight-year-old Janaisa, one of the girls in the after-school program they run, who had a history of getting into fights with her peers. “Boys or girls, it didn’t matter, they would make fun of her and she’d knock them out,” he says. But then one day in the gym, when another girl made a disparaging remark about her, Janaisa grabbed her and slammed her against the wall. “She then silently looked at the girl,” recalled Andrés, “and then dropped her, saying, ‘You’d better be glad I meditate.’”
We can choose not to make an enemy of our feelings, as intense as they may be. Instead, we can expand our awareness and allow those feelings to come up. And we can allow them to move and shift. That space brings the wisdom that keeps us from getting lost in immediate reactivity. That freedom is the essence of equanimity.
BEFORE I BEGAN meditating, when I thought of being out of balance, I would visualize a hand holding an old-fashioned scale, where one of the weighted brass plates was a bit lower than the other. But that image didn’t quite capture the way I actually felt when what I needed was some equanimity.
As life twists and turns, often we try to convey the impression that we’ve got it all together. But sometimes we maintain the appearance of steadiness only by staying in a state of tension so high that our emotional equilibrium can be blown off course by the mildest of breezes. Is it truly a life in balance if it requires so much effort? Ease is part of what we want: to feel unrestricted, peaceful, and free, to be able to respond appropriately to our world as it changes.
I’ve come to think that a better image for balance is a gyroscope. The gyroscope is a wonderful visual representation of equanimity: the ability to find calm and steadiness under stress. That balance is loose and limber, capable of ducking some of what’s coming and getting quickly back to true.
Watch a gyroscope in motion and you’ll see the wonder of the simple way it maintains a perfect balance. The core of the gyroscope, its axis, spins with such power that it keeps the big circle around it well balanced. Although constantly in motion, the gyroscope is stable, adjusting to whatever comes its way. A gust of wind or a hard knock on the table will send a spinning top tumbling, but not a gyroscope. Try to knock it over and it gracefully and steadily rights itself.
As we navigate through circumstances, we can learn to be more agile and responsive instead of reactive. The balance of a gyroscope comes from its strong core—its central, stable energy. A sense of meaning in our lives can give us that core, lifting our aspirations, strengthening us in adversity, helping us have a sense of who we are and what we care about in spite of changing situations.
The Upaya Zen Center co-abbot we first met in chapter 6, Joshin, talked to me about growing up in Brooklyn in a poor family with an alcoholic father and how he found a strong enough center to get him through:
I had these Catholic roots. Even as a young kid, I took a lot of comfort in the images of Saint Francis, the pauper, and Jesus, who loved outcasts. Those stories always moved me a lot. Somehow, I could identify with them. Religious life offered me what I thought was a way out. When I joined the Dominicans, the vow of poverty was a step up for me. I entered the Dominicans with ten dollars in my pocket, and you had to hand in all your money when you went in. And then they gave me twenty-five dollars back as my monthly stipend. So I thought, Oh, okay, you know, I could do with twenty-five dollars a month. In this sense, religious life was an escape—it started out as a way of finding some safety for myself. But this transformed over time. I developed a sense of spiritual self that was bigger than the hardships of my life. Religious life gave me a sense that I wasn’t just that. Even though I left the Dominicans, as I look back at that time, it gave me a sense of meaning. It gave me a way to use my experience, to develop a life of service, to develop a life that seemed to have purpose.
Discovering (or rediscovering) a sense of purpose begins with identifying and examining our most deeply held values. When we align our actions with those values or concerns that have centering power in our lives—those we’re most devoted to, that form the passionate core of what we care about—our actions are empowered, whatever the challenge.
Bernice Johnson Reagon, the singer with Sweet Honey in the Rock, was a dedicated activist in the early ’60s. Recalling the danger she and her friends faced in challenging segregation in Georgia, she said, “Now I sit back and look at some of the things we did, and I say, ‘What in the world came over us?’ But death had nothing to do with what we were doing. If somebody shot us, we would be dead. And when people died, we cried and went to funerals. And we went and did the next thing the next day, because it was really beyond life and death. It was really like sometimes you know what you’re supposed to be doing.”
When we have a sense of what we are supposed to be doing and we then go out and do it, we forge a center and reinforce the core strength we can return to and rely on again and again.
We also strengthen the core within ourselves by paying attention to the perimeter of the gyroscope as much as the axis. Defining a perimeter around us means we no longer consider ourselves completely responsible for absolutely everything. Even if life events are hard, we don’t have to embellish them to make them even harder: “This is going to last forever,” or “This has to be worked out right now,” or “This proves I’m worthless and ineffective.” The wisdom of the gyroscope says, “Breathe a bit so you can act, and appreciate what comes next.”
We may charge into situations imagining that maintaining control is the secret to making life work. We can affect things around us—that’s the whole point of taking action—but it’s not helpful to think we’re going to finally be in absolute control. That’s not going to happen, not even for a moment. We don’t wield control over who is going to get sick, who is going to get better, or the inevitable ups and downs of our activism. We cannot immediately direct everybody and everything in this world to our liking. Would that it were so!
We might act fervently, and hopefully we would, to alleviate suffering. But to imagine that we can decide the certain outcome of our efforts is like thinking we’re going to wake up in the morning one day, look in the mirror, and determine, “I’ve thought about it really carefully. I’ve weighed all the pros and cons, and I’ve decided I’m not going to die.” The body has its own nature. Certainly, we can affect that, and we can transform a lot and be very impactful, but death is not a decision we make.
We do everything we can, and then we need to let go of our expectation and disappointment. If we don’t, our fearful fantasies and shattered dreams will be endless. If we plant the seed of our effort with a willingness to do all that we can, plus the wisdom of knowing that we don’t do it all ourselves and that we cannot simply command everything to our liking, we won’t feel defeated by circumstances.
EQUANIMITY CAN BE described as the voice of wisdom, being open to everything, able to hold everything. Its essence is complete presence. Very early in my teaching career, we met with retreatants in fifteen-minute personal interviews, during which time we got to hear what was happening for them and respond. I quickly recognized how meeting with four people in a row, or even two, I could be encountering people with wildly different life experiences. One time, the first person I met with was recently engaged to be married and the second was utterly traumatized, grappling with the murder of her roommate.
I saw in those early days of meeting with people and being exposed to such widely fluctuating sets of circumstances that I really would need a heart as wide as the world to accommodate the shifts of pleasure and pain being presented and to be able to accompany each of these people on their own journey with all-embracing presence. It’s hard for us to allow our own or someone else’s pain fully if we are afraid it will steal our possibility for joy. It’s hard to allow joy its full expression if we have used it to avoid confronting the reality of pain.
The special kind of pain known as survivor guilt is a particularly challenging obstacle for those who have evaded terrible fates through what seems an accident of timing or birth. When you’re a survivor, to want anything more than what you’ve got can feel outrageous and selfish. Samantha Novick, a member of the Parkland community whom we first met in chapter 2, has become well acquainted with this phenomenon. She told me that she has felt strange at times, because the various mindfulness classes and workshops that arose in the aftermath of the shooting and the sense of community that arose in response had often been amazing and exhilarating for her, and yet they came about only because of a horrific tragedy.
She asked me, “How do I move from one to the other?”
“I don’t think you do,” I told her. “I think we learn to hold both at the same time.”
I really believe that. Equanimity holds it all. Peace is not about moving away from or transcending all the pain in order to travel to an easeful, spacious realm of relief: we cradle both the immense sorrow and the wondrousness of life at the same time. Being able to be fully present with both is the gift equanimity gives us—spacious stillness, radiant calm.
Environmental activist and author Joanna Macy—in conversation with Krista Tippett on the On Being podcast, said, “[If] we can be fearless, to be with our pain, it turns. It doesn’t stay static. It only doesn’t change if we refuse to look at it. But when we look at it, when we take it in our hands, when we can just be with it and keep breathing, then it turns. It turns to reveal its other face, and the other face of our pain for the world is our love for the world, our absolutely inseparable connectedness with all life.”
Equanimity means being with pain and pleasure, joy and sorrow, in such a way that our hearts are fully open and also whole, intact. We can recognize what is true, even if painful, and also know peace. Equanimity doesn’t mean we have no feeling about anything; it’s not a state of blankness. Instead, it is the spaciousness that can relate to any feeling, any occurrence, any arising, and still be free.
IN HIS ESSAY “Notes of a Native Son,” James Baldwin spoke famously and eloquently about one of life’s great tensions:
It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first idea was acceptance, the acceptance, totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are: in the light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is a commonplace. But this did not mean that one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power: that one must never, in one’s own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one’s strength. This fight begins, however, in the heart and it now had been laid to my charge to keep my own heart free of hatred and despair.
Daisy Hernández is a cultural activist, an assistant professor at Miami University in Ohio, and author of the memoir A Cup of Water Under My Bed. Hernández wrote in Tricycle magazine:
I had read Baldwin’s essay many times and had taught it to my students, but for the first time I saw that it is a teaching on equanimity. Acceptance means seeing a situation as it is. The winds—or hurricanes—that had been pushing me around were not just the horrors but my unspoken insistence that the horrors should not exist and that I should get to be a Buddhist during the “good” times, not these times. I heard in Baldwin’s words the emphasis on holding two opposing ideas: accepting the existence of injustice and fighting to vanquish it. I heard, too, the clarion call that equanimity is my “charge,” my responsibility. That it means keeping my own heart steady, free, and open.
It’s hard to describe how soft my chest cavity felt when I acknowledged all this. Maybe it was my imagination, but I sensed in my body a kind of anchoring, a settling in, a sense of I see this, even this, and I felt strong, too. It’s odd to say that I felt both soft and strong at the same time, but I did. I also felt renewed.
IT’S ONE THING to celebrate and appreciate equanimity, to understand it, but how do we cultivate it?
As the Buddha described life, he spoke of pleasure and pain, gain and loss, praise and blame, fame and disrepute, often described as “the eight worldly winds.” It’s just how life is. There is no one who experiences only pleasure and no pain. There is no act that elicits only praise and no blame. Appreciating this fact is not a call for apathy or depression. We can recognize the truth of things, accept them as the inevitable fabric of life, and understand that the best way to work for change is not to be freaked out, or in denial, or anxious with the ups, lest they dissolve, and plummet with the downs, fearing they won’t. Equanimity implies a posture of dignity even in a whirlwind of change. It implies being able to breathe. It implies complete presence. It implies being able to come to peace.
If we take the time to reflect on the inevitable turnings of life, it will build our equanimity. If we practice fully experiencing the joy of certain moments without fearfully clinging to them, it will build equanimity. If, as Joanna Macy said earlier, we look at the pain and keep breathing, it will build equanimity. All of it will build a quality of radiant calm that is intricate, shifting, alive.
In her Tricycle essay, Daisy Hernández described the first time she recognized equanimity in action, during Hurricane Andrew, in 1992:
I was a preteen, staying with my father’s cousin, Margo, and her family in South Florida … Margo did not panic when the winds began. She boiled water. She cooked pots of black beans. She slipped her husband a sedative. When the hurricane finally ended, sparing us but killing 65 people, Margo walked us around the neighborhood to survey the damage. The hurricane had yanked giant palm trees and flipped them over, so their thick roots poked at the air like colossal brown fingers. Margo … boiled more water and got us all fed, and no plate of Cuban black beans ever tasted better.
We build equanimity by pairing it with compassion. In some Buddhist literature, they use the example of an elderly person sitting in a playground, watching children play. By that age, you’ve likely seen a lot of change, you’ve had to let go of a lot. As you sit there, you see a child freaking out because they’ve broken a shovel. You’re not cold and mean. You don’t go up to the child and say, “Hey, kid, it’s just a shovel! Wait until you have a real problem, like a mortgage or sciatica.” Rather, you’re warm, tender, kind.
At the same time, you don’t fall down on the ground and sob with the child. You have the perspective of wisdom. “You know what? Shovels break.” Everything can break. Relationships break. Carefully nurtured plans break. Hearts certainly break. Life can get very hard. You know the poignancy of that in the cells of your body by the time you are of an age, and so you’re able to maintain some spaciousness in your mind with the ups and downs. Not icy distance but spaciousness. That spacious stillness is equanimity.
I know if I reach out for help from someone, I certainly don’t want them to respond with meanness, “Hey, that’s just a shovel.” But at the same time, if they fell down on the ground sobbing, “Things are irredeemably bad!” I’d be terrified. I definitely want to receive compassion and at the same time, even if it isn’t in words but in the look in someone’s eye, to sense there is some outlook that is possible that isn’t completely shaped by my heartache or disappointment.
There are meditation practices where we call someone to mind and silently repeat phrases that bring together warmth and spaciousness, caring and the acknowledgment of our limits. “I care about your pain, and I can’t control it.” That is combining compassion and equanimity. That’s what those phrases are meant to convey—that we do and should and must open our hearts and care and connect and dedicate our lives to the alleviation of suffering and yet understand that things happen as they happen.
In Buddhist psychology when we talk about certain qualities like compassion, we consider what the “near enemy” of that beneficial state might be. A near enemy is a quality that can masquerade as the one we want to cultivate. The near enemy of compassion is overwhelm or despair. These days, we would call it burnout. We recognize the suffering that exists, so there is clarity, but the pain we recognize permeates our being and we are overcome. Then we can’t serve anyone, Buddhist teachings say—and my experience bears this out. Equanimity balances our caring so that compassionate action can be sustained and we don’t drown under the weight of our sorrow.
RACHEL GUTTER, THE environmental activist we first met in chapter 5, recalls that after the U.S. presidential election in 2016, she was exhibiting signs of hypervigilance: “I would hear a loud sound in the middle of the night and sit bolt upright and the first thought I would have is, Oh, my God, North Korea is bombing us. I didn’t stay in that place of hair-trigger fear, though. And it’s my work that allows me not to sit in that place. Because I’m taking action. Because I’m doing the best that I can and doing the most that I can and having a sense that this place that I am in right now is the place where I can contribute the most.”
ANURAG GUPTA, THE breaking-bias expert we’ve met in several chapters, talked to me about how he maintains boundaries when he’s asked to help a particular cause: “For me, it’s not that I’m ignoring them. I’m not saying that they’re not important, but I know my purpose in life. I know what my passion is. I know what makes me happy. I want to move in that direction and not have to worry about taking care of everything else and everybody else.”
REFERRING TO THE flood of suffering, someone once asked the Buddha, “How did you, Lord Buddha, cross the flood?”
And the Buddha replied, “Without lingering, friend, and without hurrying across the flood.”
And then the question came, “But how did you, without lingering, without hurrying, cross the flood?”
The Buddha replied, “Friend, when I lingered, then I sank; when I hurried, I was swept away. So not lingering, not hurrying, I crossed the flood.”
I love this example for its sense of great delicacy, of ease, of naturalness. Not lingering, not sinking, not drowning, and also not hurrying, not pushing forward in a hasty or stressful manner because of too much expectation. To understand this beautiful balance, we need to understand what acceptance means.
Acceptance doesn’t mean succumbing to what’s going on. When we succumb to a situation, we collapse into it or become immersed in it or possessed by it. While trying to cross the flood, instead of moving, we linger and we drown, we get possessed by the waves of the flood, we are overcome by them. Yet acceptance clearly doesn’t mean we struggle against the waves. Trying to push against the waves or push them out of the way exhausts us and is futile. We have to use the momentum of each wave on the crossing to help us go along. But it takes a special kind of strength to be able to be this delicate, to be able to be in the middle of the flood, not sinking and not thrashing around.
The crossing of the flood is only accomplished one moment at a time. The art of this accomplishment is the ability to continually begin again. This is the other side of letting go, the doorway letting go reveals. We set forth, we struggle or get muddled or anxious, we lose our balance, and then realizing it, we begin again. We don’t need self-recriminations or blame or anger. We need a reawakening of intention and a willingness to recommit, to be wholehearted once again.
Beginning again is the consummate act of practicing equanimity.
Living and working with wisdom and compassion is a combination of accepting what arises before us as conditioned, therefore not subject to our singular willful control, and also seeing it as changing constantly, therefore always suggestive of possibility.
The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard expressed these two poles as the necessary and the possible. To reframe that in the language of Buddhist psychology, the necessary points to what we find in the moment, including the immense number of conditions that brought us here: our heritage and background and the decisions we’ve made. And it’s all that we see before us, the presentation of the universe as it is configured in this moment.
The possible is the expansive aspect, the inevitability of change: nothing is static, fixed, the world is continually being reborn, and we as part of it. We can thus envision, aspire, and transform.
To be present—alive and effective—we try to live a life with a sense of both necessity and possibility. There has to be a balance. If there’s all necessity and no possibility, one is trapped in the world of present conditions, resigned to how it all appears to be, without a vision of how it could be.
If it’s all possibility and no necessity, one is trapped in idealistic fantasy, overlooking the actual conditions of the moment, which are the basis for authentic change and transformation.
With the one extreme, we despair due to lack of inspiration. With the other extreme, we despair because we’ve forgotten to incorporate and accept what presently is—the acknowledgment of which is an essential component of the way our dreams come true.
We can be encouraged by the power of our intentions, renewed by our ability to begin again, and continually supported by the dynamic relationship of the two.
MY COLLEAGUE MARK Coleman, who often teaches retreats in the wilderness and is the author of Awake in the Wild, wrote in Mindful magazine:
Mindfulness teachings point us to meet the present moment as it is: We behold both the beauty of nature and the devastation that is occurring. We see the folly of overly romanticizing the past or drowning in doomsday scenarios of what’s to come … In learning the power of inclining our mind, we can also turn our attention to the tremendous number of constructive solutions that millions of people around the planet are working on. Organizations around the world are figuring out how to remove plastics from the ocean, draw carbon from the air, restore habitat for tigers in Nepal, and clean up the Ganges River.… These times require our mindfulness practice to hold a wide view. They ask that we hold the harsh reality of the eco-crisis, the beauty of what is still here and thriving, and simultaneously the uprising of ordinary people working all over the planet to steward, protect, and preserve the earth in sustainable ways. I have walked through scorched forests. I can look at the blackened trunks and feel a tender grief. And I can also focus on the emerald green shoots that rise out of the ashes. Both are true. Both demand our attention. To be awake today is to learn how to hold paradox in your mind and to dwell in ambiguity.
RECENTLY, I TAUGHT a meditation workshop at a large non-profit foundation that does good work all around the world. As I prepared to teach one day, I looked past the staff facing me and saw a giant sign on the wall in the back. It read, “If you can’t measure it, it didn’t happen.”
Of course, in the world of philanthropy, it’s understandable that the goal would be to actually ease suffering, not just talk about doing so while wasting money and time—embittering those involved as hope turns to weariness, and weariness to a sense of defeat. Being able to measure the “results” of good work therefore becomes a metric for trying to understand goodness.
When we are trying to assess the value of our actions in everyday life, we typically do so in terms of expectations. Did we do the good thing we envisioned in the time frame we anticipated? While self-awareness and setting goals is a powerful practice, becoming too rigid about achieving results can lead to a relentless kind of expectation. Then burnout can result, likely with a desolating habit of feeling we can never do enough.
We may, through force of habit, disparage ourselves by considering our actions to be inadequate or resign ourselves to their seeming mediocrity, but we can’t possibly know the ultimate result of what we do. As the poet T. S. Eliot wrote, “For us there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.” This larger vision of life is what sustains our efforts to bring about change, beyond the immediate success or failure of a given action.
In Buddhist teaching, the immediate result of an action is only a part of its value. There are two other significant aspects: the intention giving rise to an action and the skillfulness with which we perform it. The intention is our basic motivation, or the inner urge that sparks the action. As the Dalai Lama has said, “Motivation is very important, and thus my simple religion is love, respect for others, honesty: teachings that cover not only religion but also the fields of politics, economics, business, science, law, medicine—everywhere. With proper motivation these can help humanity.”
That is the core of our commitments and values coming to life in our choices, our direction, our decisions. An action can be motivated by love—or by hatred and revenge. Self-interest can be the source of what we do—or generosity can. So first knowing, and then refining, our intentions—the place from which we act—becomes a large area of inner work.
THE SKILLFULNESS WITH which we act relies on carrying out our intention with sensitivity to and awareness of what might be appropriate to any given situation. This is the discernment we talked about in the previous chapter. In aligning intention and skillfulness, we challenge assumptions, stretch to new ways of thinking and acting.
How to act skillfully is contingent on context. In some situations, our discernment, our best sense of how to act, leads us to say a resounding “No,” and set the boundaries we need. In other situations, our discernment leads us to say, emphatically, “Yes.”
This also leads to the question of cultural competency. To rely solely on the goodness of one’s intention without looking at the impact of what we are doing or saying, particularly in a context of diverse backgrounds or experiences, is to have only a partial understanding of our action. We need to hold that bigger view we talked about in the previous chapter, to know as best we can the context in which our action will emerge.
Let’s go back to Mark Coleman’s quotation: “To be awake today is to learn how to hold paradox in your mind and to dwell in ambiguity.” In deciding skillful action, we need this wider view and an opening to bigger possibilities revealed by systems thinking, along with a fine-grained focus on easing the suffering of the person just in front of us.
WE CAN SO easily get lost in massive numbers—“this many refugees, this much disruption”—and then disparage any effort to do the good in front of us because it seems too small. It’s important to keep track of the vastness of an issue, but working to try to change things for one person, or one set of people, isn’t nothing. Working to try to change things for one animal isn’t nothing. We need a great big vision of change and also a commitment to improving the life of even just one. There is a famous story by the anthropologist Loren Eiseley that illustrates just this:
One day a man was walking along the beach, when he noticed a boy hurriedly picking up and gently throwing things into the ocean.
Approaching the boy, he asked, “Young man, what are you doing?”
The boy replied, “Throwing starfish back into the ocean. The surf is up and the tide is going out. If I don’t throw them back, they’ll die.”
The man laughed to himself and said, “Don’t you realize there are miles and miles of beach and hundreds of starfish? You can’t make any difference!”
After listening politely, the boy bent down, picked up another starfish, and threw it into the surf. Then, smiling at the man, he said,
“I made a difference to that one.”
IF YOU EDUCATE a child and the resultant benefit to society doesn’t show for twenty years, how does that tally with being able to measure a result? If we plant a seed and can’t determine the exact time that seed will blossom, don’t we consider how we planted it, nurturing the soil and protecting the growth, as having done the best we can?
We do what we do fully, wholeheartedly, and completely because of our sense of urgency at the suffering we witness, yet we need to do it without panic, without a rush to judgment, because the unfolding will happen in its own way, at its own speed. If our dedicated intention is toward goodness, toward being whole in our actions, then that will be the thread that will lead us on. We do what we need to do, one step at a time, with confidence and joy, and let it unfold. I think that’s about the best advice we could get.
I used to look back at people in the civil rights movement in the United States, or the women’s suffrage movement, or the labor movement, and think, Wow, isn’t it amazing? They were so brave, they went out, and did these incredibly courageous things and risked being stigmatized, or getting beaten up. Or killed. But they knew it’s what they had to do to win. And then I realized one day, They didn’t know they were going to win.
That’s the arrogance of history. We look back and think, Of course, this is what they had to do. They knew this is what they had to do to get this done. But they didn’t know they were going to get it done, because in fact, we don’t know. In the moment, we’re always entering that unknown. And we do what we do, because it’s what we feel we need to do. But that is quite a task. So we keep connecting to something that will energize us and keep us going—our values, a vision of life as it might look, those who have come before us, and one another.
I was startled to discover that a single redwood tree, after it falls, contributes to the ecosystem for three hundred to four hundred years, five times longer than it was alive. Its trunk, limbs, and roots become food for other species in the forest. The stump of the fallen tree raises a new seedling above the forest floor to receive sunlight so it can grow. Eventually, the roots of the new tree grow around the stump to reach the ground.
Using nature as an example, picture the impact of an activist extending for three or four hundred years after their lifetime. I think of the influence of Mahatma Gandhi on theologian and educator Dr. Howard Thurman, promoting the power of non-violent resistance when he visited him in India. Dr. Thurman served as a spiritual advisor to many towering figures in the U.S. civil rights movement, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who was a driving inspiration for me and for countless people of this time—and I’m sure into the future.
In the meditation tradition, we call this profound connection to those who came before us and helped mold us lineage. A sense of lineage is another way we let go of self-preoccupation and realize we are a part of a larger fabric of life. It is a way to find the energy to try to affect the world while also recognizing we are not in control. This brings us to much greater balance.
When I am teaching, for example, I’m not sitting there thinking, I’m influencing the world! or Saving this person is my personal burden to carry! I’m just doing my best to help those in front of me at that moment.
I recently had a conversation about this with Barry Boyce, a meditation teacher and the founding editor of Mindful magazine. He commented, “When I’m teaching, it’s always helpful to remember that it’s not all about me. I am a small part of a very big picture. I’m coming out of a lineage of people who taught me, who were taught by others, stretching very far back. I’m just the vessel through which someone can receive what I’ve learned, however incomplete, and we can learn together in the moment as a result.”
Some sense of connection to something larger than ourselves, whether it’s a lineage or a present-day community, takes away pressure to have a singular, special achievement and be the savior of the world. Equanimity is cultivated by the sincere effort to do our best, coupled with the realization that “it’s not all about me.”
THE ESSENTIAL SPIRIT of activism, as in meditation, or service, or love, is showing up in connection and compassion and without self-importance. Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh—who is associated perhaps more than any other figure with the term engaged Buddhism—has written how “the most precious gift we can offer others is our presence.”
Joanna Macy echoes this: “I’m not insisting that we be brimming with hope. It’s OK not to be optimistic. Buddhist teachings say feeling that you have to maintain hope can wear you out. So just be present. The biggest gift you can give is to be absolutely present. And when you’re worrying about whether you’re hopeful or hopeless or pessimistic or optimistic, who cares? The main thing is that you’re showing up, that you’re here, and that you’re finding ever more capacity to love this world because it will not be healed without that.”
Joshin talks about his relationship with his dad in a way that exemplifies this extraordinary gift of just showing up:
Late in life, my father had come off the streets, and one of my sisters started to take care of him. He was still an alcoholic, but now he had been diagnosed with esophageal cancer. Even though he had smoked six packs of cigarettes a day for the last seventy years and drank twenty-four cans of beer a day, he was shocked. When they told him all they could do was make him comfortable for a few months, he asked if I would visit him. Even though my first reaction was, “Really? Do I have to do this?” I decided I should go.
He was living in one little room that smelled of cigarette smoke. He was drawn out, skinny, not well. And he said to me, “You know, they told me I’m dying.”
I said, “I heard that.”
He said, “So I wanted to see you.”
Then he got quiet, so I decided I would just sit there quietly, as well. For the next three days, every now and then, the silence would be broken by a story about his life. He was telling me stories about failure or stories where he hurt someone. They were dark stories, stories where he had gotten lost or he felt like he didn’t live up to his obligations. He detailed his regrets and mistakes, the wrong turns in his life. He told me a story about being homeless in New York and getting a job as a dishwasher at a hotel in Times Square. One day, they called him off the dishwasher line and asked him to make sandwiches, and he did pretty well. And then one day, the head sandwich maker didn’t show up for work, so they said to my father, “Ed, can you make the sandwiches today for the executive team?” And my father jumped on it, and the people liked his work. Next day, they said, “Ed, we’d like to give you this new job of making sandwiches for the executives.”
My father told me, “Ah, I was so excited about it. That was a great thing!”
Then he went back to the shelter he was living in, and he got really nervous. He thought, I can’t do this. I’m just going to fuck it up. He decided not to go back to work. This was a big regret for him, a missed opportunity.
My heart broke. I thought, My father felt inadequate to make sandwiches. I saw the depth of his pain. I realized he was going to confession. We’d sit on the sofa and he would look straight ahead as if we were in a confessional. And I’d just listen. Just bearing witness.
This is where my practice really helped me. I could see my resentment and anger, my rage and blame coming up, but I knew I didn’t have to pursue it. I found myself more capable than ever to just be with him as he is. Feeling that, he continued to reveal more and more of his life, his regrets. I realized, though, that if this is confession, there will need to be absolution—to show him he’s forgiven. I tried to say some words to make him feel better, but they sounded like platitudes: “We all make mistakes.”
I decided to cook him a meal, one my mother used to make, an Italian meal he loved. I made a tomato sauce from scratch, some vegetables he loved, and pasta. I put the meal on the table and poured him a glass of wine. My siblings were all there at this feast. He ate that food like he was in heaven. He glowed with pleasure. He wept at the table. I think he felt forgiven.
This shifted something in me. I felt like I reclaimed some part of my life and he reclaimed some part of his life. And we did that together.
I have been in a number of rooms like that, literally and figuratively—sitting with someone who doesn’t quite know how to live in this world, who feels apart or has been set apart, who has been badly hurt and sometimes has hurt others badly. Rooms marked by abandonment and despair.
It takes a lot to enter a room like that and sit there awhile. Watching your reactions, your resentments and fears come and go, not rushing to deny what you are witnessing and also not rushing to try to fix it (if it even can be fixed). It takes a lot, certainly, if it is your own father and your own history playing out, but it takes a lot no matter what the circumstances.
I’ve found that it takes strength and also a willingness to move away from a cozy, comfortable place of avoidance. It takes fortitude and a real caring for others. And it takes an ability to step out of the way so that your own ego gratification isn’t occupying center stage. It takes an ability to sit there in wholehearted presence and be resourceful enough to recognize that sometimes the best thing you can do is strategize about resolving someone’s pain, and sometimes the best thing you can do is let go of that strategizing and just make them a glorious meal—because they are worth it, even if they themselves somehow forgot that half a lifetime ago.
Joshin’s story made me think of my own father and all his difficulties and our difficulties together. But not just of him. All around the world, there are so many struggling people, and it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and helpless facing that reality. I want the trajectory of my own life, though, to be one where I don’t avoid the suffering of others but I work to be present, and openhearted, and caring, while caring for myself as well.
I want to connect in love to not just the suffering but also the strength and beauty of others. I want to connect as skillfully as I can, with wisdom and discernment. I know that to do that in an ongoing way, I need to keep cultivating awareness and balance. Every day.
I’ve learned that the path of connecting in hard places is made a lot easier by the company of others who are also trying. I’ve learned that giving goes both ways and that those who largely dwell in those rooms can have a lot to offer those who largely enjoy more freedom. I’ve learned that, just like water, compassion is strong, soft, and immensely powerful. Most essentially, I’ve learned that to continue to be worthwhile to myself and others, I need to be revitalized by finding a place of peace, over and over again. From this place of peace, from the radiant calm of equanimity, many good things will grow.
I WAS ONCE speaking to a group of people and said, “I think that if I was in charge of the universe, it would be a lot better world.” Someone in the group called out, “Are you sure?” I considered that for a moment then firmly replied, “I am really sure!” But alas, one of the great poignancies in life is that we’re not ultimately in control. Because of that, what we are looking for is the balance between compassion and equanimity. Compassion can be thought of as the heart’s moving toward suffering to see if we can be of help. Equanimity is a spacious stillness that can accept things as they are. The balance of compassion and equanimity allows us to care and yet not get overwhelmed and unable to cope because of that caring.
The phrases we use reflect this balance. Choose one or two phrases that are personally meaningful to you. There are some options offered below. You can alter them in any way or use others that you create.
To begin the practice, take as comfortable a position as possible, sitting or lying down. Take a few deep, soft breaths to let your body settle. Bring your attention to your breath to begin with. When you feel ready you can switch your attention to the silent repetition of the phrases you’ve chosen. Begin to silently say your chosen phrases over and over again.
Feel the meaning of what you are saying, yet without trying to force anything. Let the practice carry you along. You can call a particular person to mind—get an image of them or say their name to yourself, get a feeling for their presence, and see what happens as you silently repeat the phrases you’ve chosen, such as:
I care about your pain yet cannot control it.
I will care for you and cannot keep you from suffering.
May I offer love, knowing I can’t control the course of life, suffering, or death.
I wish you happiness and peace yet cannot make your choices for you.
And then move on to consider the boundlessness of life—people, creatures—as you silently repeat one or two phrases that express our capacity to connect to and care for all of life and also know peace:
I will work to alleviate suffering in this world, and I know I’m not in control of the unfolding of the universe.
May I recognize my limits compassionately, just as I recognize the limitations of others.
May I remember compassion as I work to be undisturbed by the comings and goings of events.
When you feel ready, you can open your eyes. See if you can bring some of this sense of spaciousness and compassion into your day.