A Nice Cup of Shut the F**k Up
Has feeling isolated and alone become the new normal?
It’s 4am on the third night of my silent retreat, and I’m wide awake and raging.
The poet and I had an argument before I left, and I’m rehearsing imaginary conversations I’m going to have with him in which it is obvious that I am right. My car rental was a bust, and the company is refusing to replace it or pay me back, and I’m writing them imaginary emails in my head, wishing I knew the right people so I could take them down, wishing I the kind of person who didn’t get into these situations. And of course I’m furious at myself for making the remotest deal about any of this when tens of thousands of people in the country I live in have lost their lives, their families, and their homes, while I obsess away from the comfort of my bed on a silent meditation retreat.
Coming on a retreat right now would have felt weird no matter what was going on. It always does—leaving “reality” behind and turning off your phone to be off the grid for a week—but I’ve never done it after leaving a country that was a state of emergency, after a 2-year pandemic, while the world falls to further pieces around me. And yet when I found out that one of my teachers, Derek Rasmussen, was giving this retreat while I was in Canada, not coming was not an option. In the lineage I am part of, meditation isn’t about separating ourselves from the problems of the world to sit in silent ignorance. It’s about tapping into something greater than ourselves so that we can be more supportive and sane as activists and healers and friends. And it’s about doing that as part of a community.
Like everyone else I’ve had more than a surface-level conversation with lately, I’ve been craving community like crazy.
It’s not until my fourth day here that I realize how much. After a clandestine chat and laugh with the retreat centre staff, I walk back to my room, sit down on my bed, and weep tears of relief. I have been starving for connection for so long, and getting by on crumbs. Now, I find myself at a buffet. Yes, I live with a wonderful person, but he cannot, as Esther Perel says, be my village. I feel lifted up here, from the teachings, but also from the honesty and vulnerability from the people around me. Maybe it’s not surprising that in the Buddhist scriptures, the Buddha’s cousin, Ananda, comments that it seems that: “Spiritual friends are half of the spiritual path.”
“Say not so, Ananda,” the Buddha replies. “Spiritual friends are the whole of the spiritual path.”
And if “spiritual” isn’t your thing, replace with “people you can be yourself with”.
I’ve never heard so many people say they feel lonely, isolated, like no one cares about them. It seems like feeling fragmented and cut off from each other has become the new normal, to the point that many of us don’t realize how extreme it is. And this isolation gives our neuroses megaphones, and makes the burdens of everyday life ten times heavier.
I think this is the scariest part of being alive right now.
After the retreat ends, back in “reality”, I feel like I’m allergic to my phone. I delete hundreds of newsletters (ahem) and marketing emails that I’ve let accumulate for months to “read when I have time”. I go on an unsubscribe rampage. Instagram makes my toes curl, and Facebook isn’t even in the cards. I can’t even bring myself to write this beloved newsletter, until now. In the words of one of my first spiritual teachers, the Grinch who stole Christmas, it all feels like noise, noise, noise, noise, and I don’t want to be a part of it. The other day, a friend said it perfectly: “I don’t need to know everything.”
I had been trying to know everything. Helping to raise donations for earthquake survivors was one thing, but it was as if attempting to stay on top of everything that was happening, and the other terrible shit happening in other parts of the world, and what the critics were saying about that terrible shit and the people who should have done things differently, not to mention what books I should be reading, what movies I should watch, what newsletters I should subscribe to, would somehow make me part of the solution.
All it was really making me do was miss out on a whole lot of actual life unfolding right in front of me, and be less available to people who had lost loved ones and friends, whose home country was falling apart, or who were, like everyone, just struggling and needing to be heard.
After the retreat, I was able to speak kindly and patiently to the customer service person at the car rental company. I said I knew this was not their fault, but could they please try to make it right? (Eventually) they did. And it turned out I didn’t really need a car for most of the time I was in Canada. Sometimes, it snowed so much I couldn’t have used one anyway.
As for the poet, a week of silent meditation did wonders to remind me of my part in things, and that the more I blame someone else for a conflict I’m in with them, the more I need to pay attention to the role I play in it.
I keep thinking about a story Derek told on the retreat. It was about a famous monk who would take students on a walk around the ashram where he lived. They’d always pass a giant stone, and he’d point it out and ask them how much they thought it weighed.
“One tonne?” They’d guess, eagerly. “Two?”
“It doesn’t weigh anything,” he’d say, “if you don’t pick it up.”
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Always on the nail Nat; to laugh, cry and have one's thoughts provoked🤔....thats quite a skill you've got going on there...😘😘😘
Thank you for sharing, for so beautifully articulating our tender, human heart.