I Can't Compartmentalize

Perhaps an asterisk now that I'm eighty

My representative in Congress, Ilhan Omar, sent out an email yesterday with specific instructions for what to do in the event that you or someone you know is stopped by ICE. The message includes a list of all your rights as well as links to agencies that can help the detainee and their family including ways to find the person who has been grabbed and is not showing up in something called the detainee locator system. This last reminded me of the horror during the first Trump administration when large numbers of small children were separated from their families and the names and contact information got lost in the process. Now they have a list, undoubtedly imperfect, and someone who works with my daughter-in-law is on it. We got a request for a donation to help his family last night. Then later, Ilhan Omar was sprayed with a foul-smelling substance while speaking at a town hall. This is just to say that I know I’m not at the center of anything and I don’t want to focus on myself, but events are creeping up on me. Reality is sinking in and the ice is cracking.

Photo by Bruce Christianson on Unsplash

Today, I’m allowing the grief I have tried to keep at bay rise to the surface and boil over. I read what seems like my 500th eye-witness account of events in Minneapolis. This one came from a clergy person who ran to the scene of the Pretti murder to lend support, to pray. Afterwards, on her way to her home three blocks away, she passed a house where a brown-skinned man was sitting on his porch weeping. When she asked if she could do anything for him, he said he’d been afraid to leave his house for two weeks and while he was locked up inside, ICE killed Alex Pretti. This is a heartbreaking story. It’s a distillation of what it is to be human and it’s really hard to bear.

Some people have a gift for compartmentalizing. I am not one of them. Some people have fencing available in their awareness that separates the pain of the world from the music of children making snowmen. They are presumably at an advantage. Their awareness functions like Macy’s. Toys on this floor, women’s coats over there, housewares downstairs. Mine is more like a flea market, junk of all kinds piled high. For people who can compartmentalize, the anguish doesn’t bleed into the whitewash like a red shirt mistakenly thrown in with the towels. They can read the news on their phones without feeling their stomachs cramp up. Perhaps, like me, their lives are blessed. They sit down to a big dinner in the evening. They have access to medical care. They are supported by loving partners, children, friends. I am most fortunate to be living a life like that but I don’t have the talent for compartmentalizing that would allow me to fully enjoy my blessings while the fires are burning around me. There are no fences in my awareness of the suffering. It’s like a storm system, like the recent snow, freezing rain and ICE event that swept across most of the country. There’s no escaping it. There’s nothing outside of it.

I have my strategies, of course. There are certain bonbons, little jewels of pleasure, that I indulge in which can reliably be expected to comfort me for a moment. There is the morning ritual of black coffee in bed with the Times games played in a fixed order like the recitation of the liturgy. First Wordle, then Connections, then Spelling Bee and the Mini Crossword and finally Letter Boxed. Someone should do a study on the mental health benefits of Wordle. Later in the day, there’s the glass of white wine. One glass reaffirms for me that I’m safe for the time being. Two glasses or a few tokes generally elevates the anxiety that’s bearing down like a giant wave at the ocean in Montauk. I can’t outrun it.

More effective in the long term than the distractions of word games or the sip of sauvignon blanc is the spiritual practice of presence to whatever is happening. I continue to be preoccupied with this quote from Brecht which captures it perfectly. “Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are.” The quote does not say things are the way they are and, rest assured, will not stay the way they are. It says Because things are the way they are, they will not stay the way they are. Impermanence comes first. Impermanence is the foundational principle that precedes and supports everything else. I keep coming back to this because, frankly, things aren’t so good at the moment. They may, of course, get worse rather than better. That’s where faith and civic participation come in. It’s our way of putting a thumb on the scale. If things are teetering on the brink of disaster, we can influence the outcome by making our own small contributions of effort or dollars and, crucially, by believing in human goodness. The former is very important but the latter is essential. People in Minneapolis where I live most of the year are giving us a crash course in community. Human goodness is alive and well. Empire, I have read, can handle outrage. It has no defense against empathy at scale.

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*************************************************************************************************************Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from your local bookseller.