Wisdom, Mindfulness, and Pandemic Panic

We are supposed to grow wise in old age, the same time we suffer dementia, so there must be some Goldilocks year when wisdom is ascendent. With my birthday coming up, it may be time to share my best thoughts on the subject. One way of looking at wisdom is piecemeal. People with life-experience can identify worn brakes, scarlet tanagers, or minor seventh chords just by the sound, but I call that knowledge, and that does come automatically with experience. Old people are usually knowledgeable this side of dementia. But wisdom is something broader, applicable to anything or nothing. It's about the big picture, about how to live.

We have all known old people who were angry, fretful, hateful, defensive, obsessive, greedy, vengeful, or delusional. We've all met--even seen in political office--ancients of undiminished intellect but the wisdom of drunken adolescents, ideologues fortified in some mental gulch and damned if they'll retreat. This kind of cocksure narrowness may attract followers, but it's a sad way to live. Its opposite is the ability to maintain in open, happy tranquility no matter what the monkeys of life fling. The fruits of wisdom are lasting joy, or at least a diminution of suffering--relief from the broad and almost incessant discontent that we are environmentally conditioned to feel, the hunger that sets in a few hours after the best ego-dinner. 

The Buddha called this hunger dukkha. The common translation "suffering" may be misleading because at its heart dukkha isn't physical pain, but feelings like fear, frustration, hunger, boredom, doubt, and despair--all the varieties of dis-ease, stress, or discontent. These passions have their purposes. They are useful servants but tyrannical masters. They tend to linger like poisons after their medicinal value is spent. Wisdom is the trick of letting passions go, living without needless negativity. Given the reward of living this way, we'd expect old people to have learned it, but many never do, and some of the young are precocious. My own command of the trick is wobbly, but I have have met adepts who effortlessly to draw respect because they know how to live.

My limited experience with Buddhist monks comes first to mind--a Tibetan I know personally, videos of Thich Nhat Hanh, and a magnificent temple music group that performed in Kentucky. The term that comes to mind is equanimity--not complacency, but sensitive, active, attentive equanimity that is wide awake and unguarded. I have seen it, but far from consistently, in Catholic priests, a phenomenon one friend attributed to seminary. (In my limited observation, it seems lacking in priests with careers as military chaplains, as if war undoes the seminary lessons.) Wisdom is found in women who have done nothing but live and done that right--not just in monks who sit in zazen, but in old men who sit on front porches and wave at the neighbors. I doubt that I've met anyone perfectly wise. Maybe Jesus whipped money changers from the temple in perfect equanimity; certainly, his authority wasn't Herculean muscles. I suspect that even my Tibetan Buddhist friend worked at times to keep his luminous cool, and it's something I struggle with a lot. Maybe it's something we all need to work on.

Heres a question to consider: what is the difference between suffering you are not aware of and, in any case, could do nothing about and suffering you are aware of and also can do nothing about. To minimize suffering, there should be no difference. Once you discern that you're helpless (or even that you can help tonight but not right now) nothing is accomplished by elevating your heart rate, breathing shallowly, raising your cortisone and adrenaline levels, lowering your resistance, and all that is associated with stress. If you can manage it without lowering your sensitivity to the suffering you can relieve--and maybe meditation can achieve this--wisdom is to breathe and be happy in the now regardless--even if (in a horrible example) you hear screaming but know that a doctor is tending to it better than you could. Wisdom acts compassionately without stress, without adding your own suffering to that of others. For most of us, this is hard, even impossible, and a too-direct approach to it might lead to cruel indifference.

I suppose that we all inflict massive suffering on themselves from irrelevancies, sometimes called illusions. A sports fan is frustrated and depressed because of the score in a game miles away. Less obvious illusions, but similar, are a lost election, news coverage of toxic people you will never meet, or even mass carnage nearby--or terrible weather outside of your warm room. The illusion is not that these things happened and had importance. They did. They may even call for you to act. The illusion is that that, even if you don't act, your private mood--your stress level--is inevitably connected these events, and that false linkage creates suffering.

Wisdom, I think, includes an activist challenge to do something about suffering, not quietist withdrawal. If a destructive politician threatens to win an election, besides voting, you might donate money, organize, volunteer, become a full-time party operative if you will. But once you've settled on a path of relevant activity, wisdom is to breathe and maybe listen to good music. It's no longer your business. There's no use in fretting, visualizing horrors you can't stop.

This is a state hard to achieve, but it is what I call wisdom. Accepting how things work, working within them, and then letting go. In the words of Thich Nhat Hanh, "When we are mindful, touching deeply the present moment, the fruits are always understanding, acceptance, love, and the desire to relieve suffering and bring joy" (The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching, Harmony, 2015, p. 25).

There has been increased mental illness from stress involving the Covid-19 pandemic, which is in its twelfth month, wearing all of us down. Fear can be useful. It is good to feel fear of real dangers and take needed precautions--mask up, wash your hands, maintain social distance, and avoid crowded places and contact with strangers when not necessary. Too many people, I think, have felt themselves to be exceptional, failed to take precautions, and spread the disease. I wish more people, at the onset, had been more afraid. But once, feeling fear, you have mapped a judicious program of precautions, you're done. All further stress is unwise. A Buddhist monk keeps calm and carries on, internally as well as externally.

After I wrote the last paragraph, the March 2121 issue of Scientific American appeared in my mailbox with an article by Melinda Wenner Moyer on "Coping with Pandemic Stress." In June 2020, a CDC survey found that four times as many in the U.S. reported symptoms of anxiety as as had the year before, four times as many symptoms of depression. The pandemic has inflicted joblessness, loneliness, and hunger, but over it all is a phantasmal pall of free-floating fear and uncertainty--suffering not only from what has happened, but from what might happen or might become worse. After interviewing experts, Moyer explains several "strategies for coping born of experience and science." First is to acknowledge fear and other negative emotions, journal them so you can recognize them without becoming them. This connects back to mindfulness, the specialty of the Buddhist monks I mentioned earlier, and Moyer ends her article with this coping strategy.

Mindfulness is a strategy taught to people with serious injuries or chronic diseases and involves "focusing on the present--paying attention to their sensations and feelings in the moment rather than focusing on what cannot be known with any reassurance." Mindfulness relieves the dis-ease of dukkha, of stress and discontent with things beyond our control. Mindful techniques such as relaxing "body scans" and conscious breathing have been experimentally proven to relieve anxiety and depression and are readily available. An app recommended by Moyer recommends an app supplied by the Department of Veterans's Affairs (Mindfuless Coach), obviously as a remedy for PTSD, which is an extreme category of the things-not-present that cause all of us discontent--the worries about "the country" that are fueled by 24-hour news.                     

Much of life consists of pointless and illusory irritants, even including things that pass for deadly serious and are serious but are beyond our control and so aren't for us. With media, we can reach out and find examples of any horror we choose. The future is a cafeteria of ghastliness, offering--alongside inevitable disease and death--climate change and the sun going supernova. To some extent, reporters and influencers determine our menu, but, with surprisingly few exceptions, I think, there is freedom to choose. Wisdom is the management of those choices.