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When Distance is an Act of Love

This piece was first posted on For Times Like These: Blogs from the University of Edinburgh Chaplaincy to help us through COVID19 lockdowns and meltdowns, and to raise our spirits. 

As you read this, I know that many of you – like me – will be working from home. Among you, there will be many going beyond that. This week I have been in touch with a number of students who are self-isolating, to protect themselves, partners, and family members. The coronavirus pandemic may be a public health emergency, but it is something else, too: it is an ethical emergency. Ethical, because it asks us to question all the invisible and banal ways in which we usually interact with those around us – our families, colleagues, and strangers – in order to care for us all. Emergency, because it does so with a suddenness, urgency, and ubiquity that is not found in the flow of ordinary life.

The etymology of the word distance means ‘to stand apart’. We often don’t like this: we call it aloofness, detachment, disengagement, or apathy. Distance doesn’t seem like care. If you listened to Desert Island Discs last week, you will have heard Daniel Radcliffe describe the best piece of advice he ever received, from his dad: ‘Whenever you meet somebody, always get your hand out first to shake their hand.’

It seems all the more strange to be in a situation where ‘taking care’ means being physically distant from others. Now, care is measured in metres, rooms, and buildings apart, and the new rules of caring for ourselves mean we must even be distant from our own faces: keeping those hands where you can see them, and using your elbow to hit the light switch. (Perhaps that’s just me.)

And that feeling that this is all a bit strange, and drastic, is the sign of extraordinary rather than ordinary times – emergency, rather than just emergence. Times like these make the invisible visible and the normal strange. In a society with a duty of care to its vulnerable – even if they look ‘young and healthy’, like my students with asthma, and other underlying health conditions – social distancing asks us to imagine and enact a new kind of care for ourselves and each other, a care in which distance is an act of love.

Right now, to stand apart is to be close, to ourselves and each other. It’s new, and not easy. But in our ordinary lives of the mind, and with each other, there are other forms of distance that we are used to celebrating. We talk glowingly of critical distance, perspective, and equanimity. When it comes to ethical qualities, we know from research on compassion that compassion is not being without boundaries – rather, it’s dependent on them.

That’s why I like this week’s short talk and meditation practice from Ruth King. It’s a ‘metta’ practice – metta being the Pali word for friendliness. It invites you to draw on your experience of when others have been kind to you, and bring that friendliness and kindness to yourself and however you might be feeling in this moment, and in these times.

Metta practice demonstrates the paradox of distance and closeness beautifully. Formal meditation practice is in itself a kind of distancing, a deliberate stepping out of clock time and of the ordinary day, to move in close to and cultivate the qualities we will need to take back into it. ‘Stay close to yourself in this practice, if you can,’ Ruth guides. In so doing, we move in close not only to ourselves, but also to how others can care for us, and how we might for them.

Sometimes, to distance is to move in close, and in that movement, a new horizon appears.

 

© The University of Edinburgh. No part of this content may be used without prior written permission of the copyright holder. 

Responding Wisely to Fear and Worry

This piece was first posted on For Times Like These: Blogs from the University of Edinburgh Chaplaincy to help us through COVID19 lockdowns and meltdowns, and to raise our spirits. 

The spread of coronavirus around the world is creating ‘understandable fear and worry,’ writes Willem Kuyken, director of the Oxford University Mindfulness Centre. ‘This is a double edged sword that on the one side is an appropriate call to action and on the other can create panic, reactivity and additional problems…A public health and psychological response, together, can help us find a way through these challenging times.’

What might such a psychological response look like? In the current climate, equanimity – engaging steadily, pragmatically, and with care – may seem a quality easier said than done. That is why mindfulness is inherently a practice, and not just something good to talk about. To respond wisely to fear and worry, we look this week at how the mind typically reacts to difficulty, and then we look to Tara Brach’s practice RAIN: Recognise, Allow, Investigate, and Nurture as a way of working with it.

Our psychological reactions to difficulty, stress, and uncertainty are made up of many interlocking layers. There may be initial anxiety: thoughts take the form of questions – ‘what will happen?’ ‘What should I be doing?’, or images, or statements: predictions about the future – ‘THIS will happen’ – that feel just as real and solid in the moment as this screen in front of you now.

When difficult emotions and thoughts come up, the mind catapults into its age-old protection and survival mode, and so our secondary reactions usually fall into one of two camps: avoidance, or ‘fixing’. Avoidance strategies are myriad: distraction, procrastination, various kinds of addiction, and so on. In ‘fixing’ mode, the mind jumps in and tries to help. We may ruminate, creating endless lists and possible scenarios in the imagination, all with that underlying sense that if we can only think of everything, we’ll be ok. We may scroll repeatedly through Twitter for opinions and news. We may clean the Co-op out of tinned sweetcorn.

Avoidance and fixing both have their place. The mind is after all trying to protect us; it is important to give yourself psychological respite from difficulty, and to act sensibly to safeguard your health. If you have a history of trauma in particular, it is wise to tread lightly when working with fear and worry: sometimes right now is not the time to try a new strategy, and that is ok.

So wise avoidance, and wise action, are vital – and often have a sense of clarity to them. But the most intense varieties of avoidance and fixing, like denial or panic, often feel foggy and blobby. If we were to put them under a cognitive microscope, we would see that they are made up of layer upon layer of inter-reacting thoughts and emotions, whizzing around and feeding each other without interruption. We rarely notice all the elements of this complex inter-reactivity happening, because the protect-and-survive mode of mind is so powerful. We may only be aware of a sense of compulsion, escalation, and conviction about the truth of the potential scenarios playing across the cinema-screen of the mind. And so getting stuck in avoidance or fixing typically happens when we are most frightened of, or angry about, our own fear and worry, so that we do not fully acknowledge and investigate it, enabling clarity of thought or action, but rather compound it.

It is important, therefore, not to bat away our anxiety, fear, or anger, but to recognise it with care, curiosity, and gentleness. To notice what’s here, it helps to drop in some questions: what emotions am I feeling? What thoughts are coming up in the mind? Recognising and naming difficult thoughts and feelings can bring a sense of clarity. OK, anxiety is here. So that’s what I’m feeling.

Once we see what is here, it is important to allow it to be here, again bringing as best you can a sense of gentleness to your emotions. You might even mentally note, ‘it’s ok that I feel this’; ‘it’s understandable that I am thinking this’. Allowing our fear and worry to be here in experience is not the same as saying that the situation is ok. Rather, it is acknowledging that it is ok for you to feel the way that you feel about it. Wanting to get rid of those feelings and thoughts, instead of allowing them to be there, is what tends to drive a sense of denial or fear.

Once we have recognised, acknowledged and allowed what we are feeling, Tara writes, we can investigate this experience a little more. ‘To investigate, call on your natural curiosity – the desire to know truth – and direct a more focused attention to your present experience. You might ask yourself: What most wants attention? How am I experiencing this in my body? What am I believing? What does this vulnerable place want from me? What does it most need?’ Notice if the mind tips over into rumination or avoidance again, and as best you can, bring it back to a sense of embodied listening. ‘Whatever the inquiry,’ Tara writes, ‘your investigation will be most transformational if you step away from conceptualizing and bring your primary attention to the felt-sense in the body.’

When we gently attend to and investigate our intense experiences with a sense of care and curiosity, we can nurture and tend wisely to what we have discovered. It often helps to drop a question into the mind, like a pebble in a pond: what does this need?

Often a thought or an image will arise in response to that question. While denial mind would have us continue on autopilot, and panic mind would have us do the biggest thing imaginable, often the small things are powerful: remembering to eat lunch, or drink a cup of tea; a phone-call to a friend, or a particular action or conversation. When we create space through reflection, sometimes a certain line from a poem, or something someone once told us, emerges as a source of comfort, wisdom, and good sense.

On that note, I leave you with my favourite poem on this theme, below.

 

If

If you can sit quietly after difficult news;

if in financial downturns you remain perfectly calm;

if you can see your neighbors travel to fantastic places without a twinge of jealousy;

if you can happily eat whatever is put on your plate;

if you can fall asleep after a day of running around without a drink or a pill;

if you can always find contentment just where you are:

you are probably a dog.

 

By Jack Kornfield, after Rudyard Kipling

 

© The University of Edinburgh. No part of this content may be used without prior written permission of the copyright holder. 

‘Have You Finished Yet?’ What Not To Say To A PhD Student

It’s been two years since I submitted my DPhil (PhD) thesis. It was – I do not overstate this – the happiest day of my life. But when I remember the last stretch, and its unrelenting endlessness, and the unwavering resources of energy, commitment, and faith that it demanded, I think of the very particular question that acquaintances would ask.

‘Have you finished yet?’

This question – voiced in meetings, cafés, and supermarkets – came in two flavours.

The first was pert, chirpy, and casual. In its off-handed delivery there was little sense of what ‘finishing’ meant, nor the fact that ‘finishing’ was inevitably tied to conceiving and making and rigorously intellectually-triangulating, and then doubting and re-conceiving and re-making and re-triangulating (repeat) an enormous work of scholarship, pretty much written in my own blood.

Willingly. But still: blood.

Mostly, the question was well-meant, its utterer blissfully unaware of its potency. Occasionally, it was clear to me that the asker knew that my answer would be ‘no’, and that what they wanted was to make me feel small, even if only in some fleeting way whose motivation was unaccounted for even to themselves.

Either way, I felt tired when I heard it. There was the work and then there was managing others’ impressions of the work, and towards the end, I only wanted to do one of these.

There was a second way the question emerged, however, and this one was tentative, quiet. The asker might screw up their face as if in pre-emptive apology. I sensed that they were already allowing me to shake my head ruefully, and say, ‘no, not yet,’ if that’s what I had to say.

When I did, they nodded in response. My answer was not unexpected, and yet, we mutually understood, this was nothing to do with me. It was simply about the gargantuan nature of the task, and how it typically ends not with a bang, but with a whimper, and how that whimpering phase is – well – long.

(Until, that is, the real end, when there will be a really banging and absolutely insane couple of weeks where you don’t sleep or eat. But that’s for another time.)

Usually, this questioner had completed something big themselves: a PhD, a book, a project – some multi-year edifice of skill and doggedness, vision and courage. The subtext of their inquiry was ‘It will end. I promise.’ There was still a gulf between us, because after all, I was on one side and they were on the other, but they were smiling back at me and I could just about see that there might be a rope bridge from here to there, and that helped.

It helped even more when people didn’t ask the question, when instead they simply said, ‘you’re doing so well,’ and ‘how are you?’ and ‘let me know when it’s done and I’ll take you out for lunch.’

So say those things, friends and acquaintances and loved ones of PhD students who are in the end times but not quite at the end. Swallow ‘have you finished yet?’.

And then: buy their coffee, or their groceries. Their funding has run out. They will appreciate it.