Starting off with a quote from Anne Lamott, since the entire post will be hers. Listened to her speak yesterday at UCSB Arts & Lectures. She echoed some important things in my brain and being... along these lines -
We're terrorized and terrified as a nation. Jesus said if you want to feel loved, do loving things. Fear cuts us off. It makes us clingy and grabby. Make conscious contact, be expansiveness. We're here to take care of the poor.
Jesus said: See those poor people over there? That's where I'll be.
Then she said, of ending wars and starting small, "Could you all try not to kill anyone today?"
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Good words to be sure. The fear one is tricky, too. I know all about the tendency for fear to make one clingy, to hold too closely. It's certainly been a pattern in my life: when I sense I am about to lose something (or more to the point, someone) I tend to hold on tighter... which just accelerates the process. Finding a way to counter that knee jerk response is a life-long process. Buddhism seems to have the right sense of things, with the idea of disattachment, but that can be hard to take as well. After all, the only reason we care about losing someone or something is because ... well... we CARE. Buddhist disengagement seems to be healthier, but also seems to rob us of love and passion, reducing things to a general benevolence.
ReplyDeleteAll that being said, fear doesn't do anything for anyone, so there's got to be a way to quell it without becoming less human.
The speaker was speaking more about group fear, national fear, mob fear than about personal fear, but the question remains. How do we quell fear without becoming even more indifferent than we already are? What makes it really tough is that we have multiple forces who want nothing more than to make us MORE afraid. This is where the macro-fear issue is very different than the micro one. In our regular lives, there are very few people going out of their way to make us afraid... but nationally, there are entire industries dedicated to it.
Ultimately, I think that what was suggested by Lamott and you is the right direction. Afraid of poverty? Work to reduce poverty. Afraid of war? Work to stop war. Let fear motivate you to action and to healing and not to lashing out, or putting your hands over your ears and eyes.