We are creatures of habit. Young children, who have no sense of time, find great comfort in their routines. As older people, our routines become much more complicated. Instead of finding comfort in the simple routine of going to bed after brushing our teeth, our routines become much more intricate. Our routines must include doing the functions such as pursuing an education, raising families, and/or managing careers. Our routines become so complicated that they drive us crazy.
Then, suddenly, everything changes, we are all asked, all at once, to stop doing what we were doing and take care of each other. We are asked, told, ordered to make staying healthy, and keeping each other healthy, the major focus of our lives. We are informed about how to stop sharing our germs with each other, and the penalty for not following the recommendations is death. It may be our own, it may be our parents’, our grandparents’, our children’s, our doctors’ and nurses’, or thousands of strangers’. That is a lot of pressure to be dumped on everybody at a time when all of our comforting routines are taken away.
The reason that beginning a mediation practice is so hard is because it requires us to sit still and watch our minds spin through their normal routines as we breathe evenly and respond only by noticing the thoughts and feelings and letting them come and go.
Within our normal routines, each day we go through an emotional routine. Each day we feel regular amounts of angst, regular amounts of anger, regular amounts of happiness, sadness, frustration, satisfaction, love, and so on. We go through all these emotions in response to the normal circumstances of the day. Then, when our regular circumstances and routines change, we still try to hit all the regular emotional marks. Although they make perfect sense in our normal routines, they aren’t needed in response to the different circumstances.
Meditation helps us see what thoughts lead to what emotions and what responses are available to us in that moment. During the mediation period, the response is to observe and let go. That ability to observe and let go in meditation helps us do that in other situations as we go through our normal or extraordinary circumstances. That is how we cultivate equanimity, the antidote to the regular reactive responses that we have embedded in our routines.
When the rules of society suddenly change, and our communal top priority is to not spread a virus, and to do that we must abruptly stop all the business that we are used to doing, it feels like the world has gone crazy. It feels that way because we are observing the word through the routinely spinning wheels of our minds. In fact, the world has gone sane. Food, shelter, and taking care of each other are everybody’s top priorities. By being told to stay apart, we learn how much we are together, and how much physical contact with friends, family, and strangers means to us. We learn how much we counted on things being the way they were, even though the way they were was also filled with the old predictable problems and uncertainty.
It is normal to be crazy in a crazy world, so how do we be sane in a sane world? That takes some adjustment. When the world pauses, pause with it. Breathe in. Breathe out. See what comes up in this moment. If it hurts, be compassionate with that hurt. Tend to it and let it go. See what comes up in the next moment. At this moment, the best and most important thing for you to do is to compassionately take care of yourself. As you do that, you compassionately take care of everybody else. If, in this moment, you feel extra anxious, wash your hands. At the end of the day, brush your teeth and go to bed.
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