Tag: Coronavirus

Welcome to the Guesthouse

This piece was first posted as the MindLetter for Welcome Week from the University of Edinburgh Chaplaincy. You can subscribe by emailing mindfulness@ed.ac.uk. 

They’re here! 

Music thumps joyfully from open windows. Cars filled with suitcases and duvets have descended on Newington. On the Meadows, small gaggles peer at iPhones. ‘I have no idea where we are,’ says a girl in a cropped top, braving an Edinburgh autumn. ‘I think Marchmont is this way.’  

If it is you with the iPhone, the duvet, the joy: you have travelled a long road to get here. Over the past six months, your education was profoundly disrupted. Your plans were so thrown into the air, you may have thought twice about coming to university at all. Perhaps you were one of many thousands whose grades were affected by the A Level debacle, and you tossed and turned for sleepless nights before your place here was confirmed. And – bigger, deeper, more visceral than these – you or your family may have been unwell, and suffered great losses.  

Welcome. We’re so glad to see you.  

If it is you, returning, with your University of Edinburgh hoodie that says ‘I’ve been here before’, and your vocabulary that is fluent in King’s Buildings, EUSA, and George Square: things are going to be a little different this year. You learned a lot, in spring and summer, about yourself and how you work. Lockdown may have suited you: with less travel time and social pressure, it may have given you a strange and unlikely freedom. Or it may have pushed you to your limits. Perhaps loved ones felt far way, and ennui, procrastination, and imposter syndrome flourished in isolation.  

Welcome back. Let’s be COVID-weary together.  

The word ‘welcome’ derives from the Anglo-Saxon word ‘wilcuma’, which means desired guest. Every summer, the guesthouse of the University empties, shuffles around the room allocations, and prepares to refill. To feed the hungry minds about to descend, we re-plan lectures, rebuild bookings systems, catch up on new research, tot up finance, rethink courses, streamline admin chains. We brush off old ideas and assess them for waterproofing. At some point, exhausted, we take a holiday. And then we cancel the autoreply, and open the front doors. 

This year we have done much more than that. Our staff and students have responded to the COVID crisis with extraordinary dedication and perseverance, often during considerable personal struggle. They have thought out, in microscopic detail, every implication of what it means to run a hybrid class, and have a certain flow of people through a particular corridor, and determine that those living, working, and studying in our buildings will be safe, and ensure that amidst the greatest public health challenge in a century, ideas, debate, and excellence can thrive.  

This is because you are desired guests. You come under our roof, for a year or three, and we give you a home base to venture into new worlds: Shakespeare, the Scottish philosophers, the poverty of historicism, nanotechnologies, postcolonialism, the best of the worst political orders, the ethical turn in anthropology, biomarkers for dementia, the quirks of the quark, and, just maybe, emerging zoonotic diseases.  

You will talk, and write, and argue, and forge intellectual alliances. Your presence is very much desired – in part, because we know that you are with us only for a short time. While you are here, we want to give you opportunities of mind that you will carry with you when you go, that will nourish your curiosity in dark times, and expand your sense of what’s possible in the good.  

And – here is something else about guests. Sometimes they are unexpected.

‘This being human is a guesthouse,’ wrote the thirteenth-century Sufi poet Rumi: 

Every morning a new arrival. 

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
As an unexpected visitor. 

It happened in the thirteenth century, and, particularly in these new circumstances, it may happen now. You open your suitcase when you arrive or come back, and discover that nestled alongside your Tefal pan and Bluetooth speaker, there is trepidation; loneliness; doubt, and self-doubt; there are a million questions, rolling through your mind like beads from a broken string.  

And if you are the steward of the guesthouse, with your pre-recorded lectures, and vast spreadsheet of contingency plans, and dizzying list of Zoom links, and fluorescent ‘keep your distance’ signs flashing before your eyes when you close them to sleep at night – you may be disappointed, weary, self-critical.  

Guest and steward alike may wonder: how do I respond to these guests? 

This is what Rumi suggested: 

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight. 

Now, neither ResLife nor the Estates Furniture Store will be thrilled if guests start flinging furniture around. But sometimes, Rumi seems to say, there are some really fine sofas waiting in the wings – and things get uncomfortable first. The chair breaks beneath you, and those beads from the broken string turn up in your socks.  

‘Be grateful for whoever comes,’ writes Rumi, ‘because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.’ 

The loneliness lurking in the suitcase, painful though it is, is doing something important. Things are, after all, not quite as you wished them to be. Acknowledge that; mourn it a little. Let it move through you, so that after a while, you can sit up, and blink, and start to sense this community as it is, alive and thrumming. Connection is in the fabric of a university; it has been carefully built, not just over a summer, not just to meet the challenges of COVID, but over decades and centuries. So don’t dwell in your loneliness for too long. You are our desired guest, and there is a seat at the table for you.  

And when you are the steward, and you are weary – your weariness is welcome. Make space for it. Lie low, where you can, and replenish; take a breathing space, over and over, if you need. Then, delight in the curiosity and energy of our guests. Alongside the tiredness, and the shiny fluorescent signs that say ‘keep your distance’, and the million questions rolling like beads all over the floor, we are so pleased to see them.  

Welcome, whatever you carry in your suitcase at the start of this semester. It’s going to be an adventure, and there will be some Fawlty Towers moments. But we have strong foundations, exceptional people, and great scenery. The front doors are open. See you soon.

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

Against Productivity in a Pandemic

This piece was first posted as the Mindfulness Virtual Drop-in from the University of Edinburgh Chaplaincy. 

How should we use our time in this strange era?

As the lockdown continues, two different approaches have appeared. One we might term mission productivity. Nick Martin pastiches this in his article for The New Republic, ‘Against Productivity in a Pandemic.’ ‘Did you know Shakespeare wrote King Lear while he was quarantined during the plague? Have you tried baking as a form of corona therapy? How about turning your living room into a home gym using soup cans for hand weights?’

We have all this free time now, we think. We must optimise it, and ourselves. During this pandemic we can master Collaborate, write more papers, develop COVID-19-relevant syllabuses, and ‘sprinkle COVID-dust’ on our grant proposals. On the side, we might become better bakers and level up in Duolingo Italian.

But, Martin goes on, ‘This piece, the one you’re reading right now, took roughly an hour longer for me to write than it normally would have because I am currently sitting in my New York apartment thinking about a million different things: Are all my grandparents properly secluded? Is my extended family taking this seriously enough? Should I rent a car and drive home and get away from the city before it all really goes to hell? Are rental car companies going to be price gouging? When will the money from my cancelled vacation return to my account? Did I order enough cat food? Do I have enough food? What will things look like two weeks from now? A year from now?’

It turns out that time is not a zero-sum game. Albeit you may be working remotely, so your commute has disappeared; perhaps we spend less time around the biscuit tin in the common room or the work kitchen. But when the world turns upside down, fears and worries infuse our time with their frenetic tug. There are the logistics of managing the roof over your head, food, healthcare, looking after vulnerable family or neighbours. For many in our University, time demands are increasing, not diminishing. Work requires more phone calls, exam revision needs more chasing emails, or there are small children at home to care for.

And, in the end, life is more than 2 + 2 = 4. The disappeared moments of connection or humour do not add up to an extra half hour of ‘free time’, tidily re-allocated. Meanwhile, at the heart of many fears and worries are important questions: what might the future hold? How do we want to inhabit it – personally, institutionally, and societally? To tend our worries, and use our fear wisely, we need time and space irreducible to the metrics of productivity.

And so another approach has taken shape. In her article for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Aisha S. Ahmad lays out beautifully ‘Why You Should Ignore All That Coronavirus-Inspired Productivity Pressure.’ Ahmad is assistant professor of political science at the University of Toronto, and she speaks from first-hand experience of crisis, having conducted fieldwork in war zones across the world.

Ahmad shows how beneath the drive for productivity is an assumption that all this is temporary; that we can ‘buckle down for a short stint until things get back to normal’. We see this as an interruption of ordinary business, a lacuna to be plugged according to the usual rules. We wait for the clock to begin to tick again, as it always has. So we bust a gut to produce, or beat ourselves up because we’re too distressed, exhausted, or beset by small crawling people to do so.

But in times of global crisis, Ahmad writes, ‘All of that is noise – denial and delusion. Denial only serves to delay the essential process of acceptance, which will allow us to reimagine ourselves in this new reality.’ So honour your straitened circumstances, she says. Attribute value to the care you give yourself and your loved ones. Once you have recaptured some sense of security and stability in your circumstances under lockdown, ‘The emotionally and spiritually sane response is to prepare to be forever changed.’ And to undergo change, we need a fundamental shift in how we think about productivity and time.

With this in mind, this week’s suggested practice is a twenty-minute sitting meditation in which you can simply sit, be, and allow your mind to be as it will. We need not ‘achieve’ anything in meditation. There are no targets, and no spreadsheets to track our progress. Mindfulness is only ever about gentle, curious awareness of what is actually here. We don’t need to clear the mind, or become calm; we need simply honour things as they are, moment by moment. So acknowledge your mind’s sense of busyness and urgency, see it clearly, know that it’s understandable, and come back to the breath; note your fears and preoccupations, with gentleness. Listen to sounds, the chatter of your own mind, the landscape of sensation in the body. Attend to what is really here, and in so doing, know that this is not ducking out of reality, but rather turning towards it.

When we turn towards what is real and present, we move forward on solid ground. So this week, begin to make mental space around the edges of your to-do list. Notice when you are lost in mission productivity, and begin to experiment with something a little different.

To finish with Ahmad, ‘Be slow. Let this distract you. Let it change how you think and how you see the world. Because the world is our work.’

 

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

The Tiger Who Came To Tea

This piece was first posted as the Mindfulness Virtual Drop-in from the University of Edinburgh Chaplaincy. 

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve been struck by how many in our University community are currently guests or hosts. Vulnerable family members have moved in, or we have moved to be with them; friends are in the spare room, caught off guard by travel restrictions or closing borders. With the onset of online studying and meetings, even if there are no literal extra persons in your home, we are visiting each other in unusual ways. We become conscious of the artwork on the wall behind us; small children grumble in the background; and of all our fears right now, our greatest is that we will have to stand up unexpectedly on a call with our manager or tutor, revealing…pyjama bottoms.

As guests and hosts, with end-dates unknown, we are thinking more carefully than ever about how to sustain ourselves and those around us. As I steadily work through the soya milk I took, by special request, when I travelled to be with family in the south, I keep thinking about Judith Kerr’s 1968 illustrated book for children, The Tiger Who Came To Tea.

For those who didn’t grow up with this treasure, Sophie and her mum are sitting having tea when the doorbell rings. It can’t be the milkman or the grocer’s boy, says mum. Indeed not. It is an enormous tiger, in search of his own tea. In he comes to join them. He eats all the sandwiches and all the buns and biscuits on the table, and drinks all the tea and the milk. Then he eats everything in the kitchen, drinks every last pint of dad’s beer, and even drains the taps. Off he goes eventually, sated – but now there is no water left for Sophie’s bath, mum has nothing to cook for supper, and hungry dad’s arrival is impending.

I’m thinking about The Tiger Who Came To Tea partly because the world it conjures up – a world where the milkman and the grocer’s boy come to the house – seems to have reignited afresh, as those with underlying health conditions self-isolate, online supermarket delivery slots remain elusive, and vegetable-box sellers, milk producers, and bakers ramp up their provision.

But I’m also thinking about it because it invokes the physical, social, and psychological guests, hosts, and hungers of this pandemic.

The extra hungry bodies in the house, who may ask politely, and be beloved – in Kerr’s illustrations, Sophie curls up with the tiger, stroking his tail, and playing with his whiskers – but will nonetheless clean you out of house and home. If you are living on the breadline, the clue in that word: the real chance that you will run out of food. The fear that you are the tiger, and that you are burdening others. The sense that there is a tiger at the door, who will take everything you offer and more, draining your very taps, until you have nothing left to give. The sense that however much you try to nourish yourself in this time, it’s not enough, and that nothing can give you what you most need.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ says Sophie’s mum, when the tiger has finally gone; and that can be exactly how we feel.

How might the story end? In The Tiger Who Came To Tea, Sophie’s dad comes home, and Sophie and her mum tell him what happened. They go to a café for supper, and the next morning, Sophie and her mum go shopping. They fill the house up with food again, and Sophie buys a tin of tiger food, too, just in case.

I like this ending for two reasons. I like it first because it begins with people talking to each other about what has happened to them. ‘I don’t know what to do,’ said Sophie’s mum – and yet she does: the first thing to do is just to talk about it.

The second reason I like this ending is that it’s not just one deed that saves the day. It’s multiple deeds, triaged. First, people gather round. They tell the truth of what is here, and what has happened. Then, together, they attend to what is needed right now: they are hungry, and must eat. Next, they prepare themselves for the hunger that may lie ahead. And finally, they bolster themselves against what made them hungry: not with a gun, or a trap, but by preparing to feed the hungry tiger, should he return – with tiger food, and not their own sandwiches.

It can be difficult to talk about our hungers. We may feel ashamed, or think that nothing can be done. But the response to the pandemic – the hundreds of thousands signing up as NHS volunteers; the flood of Whatsapps and text messages from neighbours, colleagues, friends – has shown us that we are not alone. We can talk to each other about what we need, whether it means turning to the person next to us, picking up the phone, or writing. In so doing, we treat our hungers and fears as honoured guests. We nourish ourselves, so that we are full enough to feed another.

In the spirit of this, for this week’s practice I invite you to try a body scan, by Melanie Fennell. The body scan attends to each part of the body in turn, from the tips of the toes to the top of the head. It listens to everything, and neglects nothing. By gently acknowledging what is here, the body scan creates a wise foundation for observing what is really needed. And then, perhaps, you might like to talk about it – with your family, a friend, or just with yourself, in a diary or on a walk.

May you and your tigers keep safe and well over the next week.

I leave you with a poem, The Guest House, by Rumi.

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

 

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

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.