An election that could break America.  A global pandemic.  Fires, hurricanes, and the ticking time bomb of catastrophic, exponential climate effects.  Protests, riots, polarized politics, poisonous discourse.  Take your pick.  If you’re anything like me and find anxiety tiptoeing into your bedroom at night to whisper in your ear, you need new perspectives, new tools.  Here’s my list of analog remedies – skills and approaches that call on continuity, relationship and resonance. 

1.  Be like water.  I got this one from Bruce Lee:

Nothing is weaker than water,
But when it attacks something hard
Or resistant, then nothing withstands it,
And nothing will alter its way

The above passages from the Tao Te Ching illustrate to us the nature of water: Water is so fine that it is impossible to grasp a handful of it; strike it, yet it does not suffer hurt; stab it, and it is not wounded; sever it, yet it is not divided. It has no shape of its own but molds itself to the receptacle that contains it. When heated to the state of steam it is invisible but has enough power to split the earth itself. When frozen it crystallizes into a mighty rock. First it is turbulent like Niagara Falls, and then calm like a still pond, fearful like a torrent, and refreshing like a spring on a hot summer’s day.

Excerpt from Bruce Lee: Artist of Life

What does this mean for me as I wrestle with my nighttime visitor?  The first thing I hear is, stop wrestling. But wait, my mind cries!  Mass extinctions!  Societal collapse!  I can’t simply allow the things I love to perish, can I? 

Paradox is tricky.  If I stop fighting, won’t I lose?  Yet, water does not fight.  Water cleaves to itself, yet has the power to carve canyons.  Water can move, can adapt to its environment, even as it reshapes that environment.  Where is my energy spent, and to what effect?  Can I allow things to be as they are, even as I direct my intentions and actions towards the creation of new forms?

2. Create instead of reacting.  Creation has digital aspects because it speaks to our power to invent from nothing.  And of course, we can’t create from nothing unless we start from nothing. The first step of creating, then, is always distinguishing context. What is already present? And the humdinger of human contexts that is always present in one form or another is — something is terribly, horribly, irreparably wrong here. Something is wrong with me, with the world, with the universe, and it must be fixed.

This context is so transparent, it’s hard to experience it as context. Like I said, mass extinctions! Societal collapse! And you’re telling me that nothing is wrong? But to distinguish context is not to assign its opposite. I am not saying something is right. I’m saying the assignation of meaning itself is a human activity. When a fire rips through a forest, animals die, perhaps experience fear, perhaps suffer, but to our knowledge, there is no assignation of meaning in the animal’s mind to this new set of circumstances. They don’t bemoan impending death. They don’t rage against the heavens. That kind of meaning is human currency, and it’s so transparent to us that we can’t see it.

What I wrestle with at 3 a.m. in the dark places of my mind is, in fact, this: something is terribly wrong that I am powerless to fix. Who can sleep in the face of that? Who can live, prosper, hope? We do our best, throw things at the wall (and each other), hope that something will stick. But within that context, nothing will ever be truly possible.

What then? I don’t have an answer to that, but it’s a great question. If one begins by returning “something is wrong” to nothing, simply by seeing it and noticing its effects, one is left with… well, nothing. And maybe it’s okay just to be there for a while, because the tendency will be to create something only to find it is more of the same. Water runs in its established course. So the first step is distinguish, again and again and again. I guess that makes it the first, second and third step. But more likely it is every step you’ll take until you die if you want to live a created life. And if you’re not creating, you’re being created.

We can tell a lot from the kinds of conversations we engage in, both with others, and in the privacy of our minds. What do those conversations actually provide?  Am I amassing evidence for a point of view?  Spinning my wheels? Vilifying others?  How do I frame the issues I care about?  What constitutes meaningful and effective action? All these signs point towards the context that is already present, and they are our helpers if we’re serious about creating — acting, not simply reacting.

3. Dig deeper. The world wants you to be a thing, and that has never been more true than it is today. In the digital era, we are deluged with partisan messages, and not all of them are political.  We are constantly being asked to codify ourselves, to identify with “this,” not “that,” to relate to ourselves and others as content, simplified for ready consumption.  Are you right or left, for or against, a Dem or a Trumpie, privileged or marginalized? This or that. We are conditioned to have thoughts, but not to think.  Thinking involves context, creation — the realization that one can, at any moment in time, disengage from the conventional narrative. One can allow oneself to become bored by it and come up with something new. 

Our outcomes (and our experience) are determined by the types of conversations we have, not by the content of the conversations themselves. I can talk until I’m blue in the face, telling you what a (insert your favorite expletive) you are, and I will never achieve anything but alienating you — with perhaps a congratulatory word for myself thrown in. Can we look unflinchingly at our actual intentions when we engage with others about the issues we care about? The actual effects we achieve?   Let’s be honest – if we have a pulse and we’re breathing, we want to know.  We like to judge others, but we don’t like to be judged.  We care about what others think of us – even those “take-me-as-I-am” kind of persons.  These are the things that drive us – whether we’re talking to a friend or holding forth on the Senate floor.  We are the hero in our own story – even when what we’re being right about is how wrong we are. 

What other kinds of conversations are there, anyways?  My husband is a safety consultant and once spent an afternoon with a trucking company, courting their business on behalf of a broker.  The company owner scrolled on his cell phone as his safety manager laid out all the training he’d devised to ensure safe driving behavior.  Johnny let him finish without interjecting once, much to the alarm of the broker – they were trying to establish the superiority of their services, after all.  When the safety manager was done, he asked if there were any questions.  “Just one,” Johnny said.  “What do your drivers think makes them better and safer?”    The owner put down his cell phone and looked up for the first time that day, called out in the hallway for one of his drivers, and put the question to him.  And what the driver said bore little resemblance to what he’d been taught.  With one question, Johnny shifted the context from “look at all the great things we’re teaching,” to “what is actually being learned by the real-world operators” – which is, if you’ll pardon the trucker pun, where the rubber meets the road.  Shifting context gives us access to operating in the right world, the one where results can be achieved. And it allows us to deal with causes, rather than simply reacting to effects.

4. Ask questions. If I’m not the “this” I’ve been handed by society, by pundits, by marketers, by the internet – what am I?  And if I’m not a “this” at all, and you’re not a “that,” then what are the both of us together?  What do we share in common?  If we’re speaking of another person, there’s our shared humanity, of course.  If it’s a living creature, there’s mortality and dependence on certain essential factors for survival.  If it’s an issue, where is the common ground?  What do we really want when we allow ourselves to be shaped by our own questions, not by the dictates of others? 

Good questions are open-ended, designed to distinguish, not limit.  But the best questions of all have no ultimate answers and are instead lived.  When is there a good enough answer to “what am I?” that you’re simply done?  And if you stop living that question, what are you living instead?  Are you a human doing, a human having, or a human being?  Imagine a world, where the concerns that shape us lived as questions without answers, not questions on a true-or-false quiz?  How much depth, scope and nuance would exist in that world?

5. Lean into relationship.  Creation is not really an intellectual exercise.  It’s not our minds that tell us if we’re on the right track but our hearts, our instincts, our sense of wholeness, connection and happiness.  Are our relationships intact?  Is there a loss of trust or accord?  Things unsaid, or those that can’t be said?  Think of it as concentric circles, radiating outwards.  There’s the quality of those relationships that sustain you, your family and dearest friends, the people who are barely distinguishable from “you.”  And moving outwards, there are those you share with your countrymen and women, the human race, the natural world.  Examining where there is a loss of accord, in any of these domains, leads directly to the kinds of questions that will make an actual difference – because everything is accomplished in relationship.

6. Start small, start here, start now.  One shift in perspective.  One insight.  One new habit.  One risk taken.  We can all see that big things are made up of little things.  But perhaps there are no big and little things at all.  If I look at the challenges that face us as a mountain to climb, I’ll never get started.  But if I look at the step in front of me, there’s no reason not to begin.  Maybe one step is as good as the whole mountain, because that’s all I’ve got in this moment. It’s all I’ve got, right here, right now — and, after all, here and now is all there is.