Connection Matters
If you know me, you know I don’t argue with people online. If I get invited to a fight online, I do my best to refuse the invitation, as I haven’t found the forum of online debate to be an effective means for changing anyone’s mind or a productive use of my own time and energy. Don’t get me wrong— I am willing to have difficult conversations in the name of increasing understanding and deepening intimacy. However, I haven’t found that such discussions unfold with empathy and insight on a social media feed that is open to thousands of people, each of whom has an opinion and many of whom have no interest in respectful discourse.
That being said, the election results are on my mind and in my heart and this entry has some reflections about how I am processing current events. If you are tired of hearing about the election, you can stop reading. I’ll probably be ready to talk and write about yoga, teaching or something more philosophical at some point, so don’t walk away forever. These musing are inspired by a reading, writing and movement exercise that I offered in my Wednesday night Women’s Writing group, Bittersweet.
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“What are you separated from; what or whom have you lost?…
Remember the linguistic origins of the word, yearning. The place you suffer is the place you care. You hurt because you care. Therefore, the best response to pain is to dive deeper into your caring. Which is exactly the opposite of what most of us want to do. We want to avoid pain: to ward off the bitter by not caring so much about the sweet. “But to open your heart to pain is to open your heart to joy,” as the University of Nevada clinical psychologist Dr. Steven Hayes put it in a Psychology Today article he wrote called, "From Loss to Love.” “In your pain you find your values, and in your values you find your pain.”
…So now, ask yourself that question again: What are you separated from, what or whom have you lost? And also ask: Where is your particular pain pointing you? What matters most deeply to you? And how can you bring it into being?” (1)
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I cried my first post-election tears last night. In stressful times, I often skip grieving and lamenting and go straight to action. With all the fire in my nature, I am nothing if not one for action. During a short movement exercise I offered our writing group where I encouraged people to put their body in the shape of loss and then in the shape of caring and to pulse between the two postures as a means to explore the inner territory through movement before writing, I felt the contracted, heart-closed, inward flowing posture of grief and the outer, heart-open, arms-wide posture of caring. Feeling the gap between the two states, my eyes filled with tears as disappointment and grief welled up, aided by the music and the support of the group.
I feel separated from a sense of hope and from a trust in the basic goodness of people. In the election I lost a sense of possibility in a movement toward a way of living that might include and expand, rather than exclude and contract. The crushing sadness I feel about the election outcome does not feel like a sadness that will leave me any time soon, as what Trump is proposing feels more akin to a moral injury than it does a simple political loss. And my fear is that the impact of the people he will empower and the policies he will implement will last for generations to come and will not likely be undone in my lifetime. I can’t help but think that things are going to get much worse before they get any better.
All day my phone updated me about Trump’s cabinet nominations, about the key players in the next iteration of America that will unfold, each of whom seem as frightening as Trump himself, if not more so. So, yeah, there is that— one zealot after the other stepping into the fray to serve a malignant narcissist with unchecked power and a corrupt Congress, Senate and Supreme Court to underwrite the entire experiment.
I can’t help but think about what will be required internally to manage this impending nightmare— between the deregulation of fossil fuels and the dismantling of environmental standards to the predicted recession and likely depression the tariffs and billionaire tax cuts will initiate, from mass deportations to abortion bans and the assault on LBTQ+ rights that is likely to follow, I wonder —what will mental health actually look like in such a scenario? What will joy, connection, satisfaction and well-being look like against and within such a backdrop?
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Yesterday morning at the gym, someone asked me how I was doing. I said, “Well, I am working to readjust the means and the mechanisms by which I take my bearings.” They looked at me quizzically, not understanding my meaning. I said, “Well, it’s unlikely the economy will improve, so making more money certainly won’t be a gauge for success of any kind. It’s likely that more rights will get stripped away so a sense of progress on a humanitarian front is unlikely to be a source of joy or satisfaction. And just look at the succession of power— if it isn’t Trump in office, we have JD Vance to look forward to. And if not him, then Mike Johnson steps in to lead.” To which this poor person replied, “Oh, I hadn’t thought of all that…”
Yeah, so much for small talk in the locker room.
Sitting around after class, several of us talked about how tomorrow is “partner day for the metcon.” (Metcon is short for “metabolic conditioning” or the cardio portion of class. On partner days, you team up with a classmate and chip away at a list of movements, splitting the work between two people.) Jennifer said, “Oh, I hate partner day. I always worry about who I am going to slow down and risk getting mad at me.”
Meghan said, “Oh, I love partner day. It’s always fun and no one takes it that seriously.” (I think we could chalk this difference up to introversion (Jennifer) and extroversion (Meghan), but that is a different entry for a different day.)
I said, “Yeah, maybe its more like, “Who am I gonna work hard with and suffer in solidarity with today?” They all looked at me as though I had said something profound. I added, “I suppose there is a metaphor in there somewhere.”
Solidarity in suffering matters to me.
Relationships matter to me.
Connection matters to me.
These are the values I care about. These are the values in which I have faith and around which I plan to continue to orient myself and by which I will take my bearings.
It’s been a heavy week, but I do have to say, I have talked to my friends more than usual and connected more deeply with my more casual acquaintances. While making small talk feels harder than it often does and the hum of anxiety has been impossible to ignore, I have found refuge in showing up to my usual activities with a heightened commitment to kindness and presence. I looked out into the gallery of one of my online classes and realized that many of us in the class have been practicing asana together online since March 2020. I commented after class that “I feel like we managed the pandemic together and we now have another set of circumstances to weather.”
I, for one, don’t intend to stop caring— about my own sanity and well-being or about yours. I, for one, will continue to cultivate my capacity for presence, for connection, and for faith in small acts of kindness that move me forward in, and through, love. Whether it is time at the gym, on my yoga mat, on my cushion, writing in my journal, walking my dog, or having meals with my friends, I plan to keep going, a little bit at a time, over a long period of time.
All right. That’s it for now. Let me know how you are doing and where your grief and caring live.
Keep the faith.
More soon.
(1) Cain, S. (2022) Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make us Whole. Crown Trade Publishing
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