Read this if you’re freaking out about politics

“To care and not to care”

Every year at this time, the Buddhist teacher Joseph Goldstein does a three-month solo silent meditation retreat at his home in rural Massachusetts.

Occasionally, even though he is on retreat, he’ll send me an email or a text. (Technically, you’re not supposed to use technology on retreat, but when you’re Joseph, who has been practicing for nearly 60 years, you get to bend the rules.)

Anyway, the other day, I got an email from him with a poem he had just written.

A little context: About five years ago, at age 75, Joseph began to write poetry—seemingly out of nowhere. As he describes it, the words started coming to him out of a void, like a channel had opened up to him.

To me, his latest poem is perhaps his most powerful. I find it incredibly helpful for dealing with the political tumult we have been experiencing:

Venus in the Western Sky

My companion in its brightest month
A diamond cool radiance
Lingers above the horizon
Reminding me (in the words of the poet)
To care 
And not to care
As all the earth-bound madness
Engulfs our lives.
Steady, faithful
A light in the darkness
As the day
Morphs into night

To me, there are three practical and actionable takeaways here when it comes to surviving the “earth-bound madness” Joseph references:

1. The power of perspective

I find it genuinely helpful to view current events through the lens of Venus. Joseph, who is definitely not a theist, also sometimes talks about viewing the ups and downs of our lives through the “God perspective.” It can pull you out of your ruts and broaden your view.

NASA/JPL-Caltech

In fact, Joseph’s reference to Venus reminded me of another of his common riffs. In many of his dharma talks, he references the famous picture of planet earth (shown above) taken from Voyager 1 in 1990, about which Carl Sagan penned these excellent lines:

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam…

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

2. “To care and not to care”

Those lines, at the heart of Joseph’s poem, come from another (only slightly better-known) poet, T.S. Eliot.

In my opinion, this paradox is at the heart of living a sane life.

On the one hand, it’s true that we live on a “mote of dust,” and that our lives are impermanent and fleeting. (As it says in The Diamond Sutra, this existence is “like a star at dawn, a bubble in a stream, a flash of lightning in a summer cloud, a flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.”)

On the other hand, what we do matters. As the Buddha said, our only true possessions are our actions. While we’re here, we have endless opportunities to be helpful—which, in turn, will help us be happy in our own lives.

As the teacher and writer Ram Dass once said, “We’re all just walking each other home.”

3. Action absorbs anxiety

If the news is damaging your mental health, perhaps the best way to manage it is to find opportunities to help.

Can you be, per Joseph’s poem, “a light in the darkness as day morphs into night”?

This stance is empowering and ennobling. And it need not involve acts of heroism or ruinous altruism. As Joseph says, “There is no hierarchy of compassionate action.”

Volunteer. Donate. Call your mom.

In sum… Yes, for many of us, these are dark times. Neither Joseph nor the Buddha is trying to sugarcoat anything. And/but… It is possible to reduce your own anxiety, and thereby increase your helpfulness quotient to everyone around you. To be a node of sanity in an insane world. To create unpredictable ripple effects of benevolence.

As I often semi-joke: There is a geopolitical case for getting your shit together.

Thank you, Joseph, for the elegant reminder.

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