Courage in a Pandemic
Each time we check our phones, a headline sends a current of energy rushing through us. “The virus is spreading… markets are crashing… schools are closed…”
If you’re worried (or worse), it’s understandable. There’s panic in the air and anxiety in our bones. And fear is a natural, healthy response to danger.
But how can we resist giving in to overwhelm, letting panicked thoughts take over, or allowing the sirens of the news media infect our mind? We know intellectually that these kinds of reactions don’t help—but how can we actually prevent ourselves from falling under their sway?
The answer begins with an old-fashioned word that seems remarkably relevant today: courage.
One of the greatest myths about courage is that it means not feeling afraid. If I were brave and courageous, I wouldn’t feel anxious, panicked or worried, we might think.
But courage isn’t the absence of fear. It’s the willingness to be present and respond in spite of fear.
It means we have the capacity to see clearly and self-soothe and during a crisis. It means we have enough balance and wisdom so that we don’t freak out when things go haywire—or, perhaps even more importantly, so we don’t shut off in denial and pretend everything is okay.
For all of us alive today, this pandemic is unprecedented. In the midst of such urgent danger, of course many of us are on high-alert. Three of my own loved ones are in very high-risk categories. Two of them are stuck in Rome as I write (and have been for months now). I feel concerned, and I'm in touch with them almost daily.
But I don't feed the fear or let my mind move into panic. This is where all the effort we’ve put into meditation, mindfulness, and wisdom can start to pay off. This is what we’ve practiced for.
It takes courage to be with things as they are. And that is what meditation teaches. Meditation teaches us how to turn toward and be with the truth of each moment—pleasant or painful. When there’s pain, hardship or discomfort our hard-wired tendencies are to resist: to fight it, to look for someone to blame, to turn and run the other way, or to just shut off altogether and avoid it.
From an evolutionary perspective, the fight-flight-freeze response make complete sense. It’s adaptive and can keep us alive in extreme circumstances.
But when the threat becomes amplified by our own minds, that evolutionary mechanism can end up making things worse, adding more spin to an already anxious situation.
Here’s what courage looks like for me.
It was pouring rain outside during my meditation this morning—blessed rain during this dry California winter. I sat quietly, feeling the firmness of the chair and allowing the patter of the rain to blend with the rhythmic sensations of my breathing. I thought of my parents one of them across the country, the others half-way around the world, thought of their age and vulnerability. I could feel the shiver of fear and uncertainty move through my heart and limbs. I let it be here, without turning away, without tightening or spinning worst-case scenarios. I became aware of the space around me, the drops of water touching the earth outside. With each breath, allowing myself to feel the fear, it slowly started to melt.
It takes courage to turn towards what’s happening. This is possible. It’s available for each and every one of us. And when we can meet our own life with courage, we have more discernment, more compassion, and more gifts to share with others.
Oren Jay Sofer is a nationally recognized teacher of meditation, mindfulness and Nonviolent Communication and a regular contributor to the Ten Percent Happier app. A member of the Spirit Rock Teachers Council, he holds a degree in Comparative Religion from Columbia University, is the author of Say What You Mean: A Mindful Approach to Nonviolent Communication, and is the co-author of Teaching Mindfulness to Empower Adolescents. Oren also teaches online courses in Mindful Communication. Social: @Orenjaysofer
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Editor's Note: Poet and author Ross Gay was a recent guest on the Ten Percent Happier podcast, and spoke with Dan about the power of joy, delight, and connection. Gay recently released a new collection of essays, The Book of (More) Delights. This was a continuation of a project that began when he decided to spend a year writing out moments of delight throughout the day. He explains the difference between delight and joy:
“I think delight is occasional. Delight is the hummingbird buzzing by your ear. Whoa! That's delight. …Joy is something that is always present, and it's available to us, and you kind of enter it, or it finds you. But it doesn't feel like it requires an occasion… I think of joy as our fundamental connection.”
He goes on to describe how delight can be contagious and provide opportunities for connection.
“This sort of contagion of moods is a real thing—our own moods and other people's moods... I'm not just delighted inside of the little cave of my brain. I'm delighted because I'm observing things outside of the little cave of my brain. And often those things are like these instances of sweetness. It's the witnessing of a kind of sweetness outside of myself…People are so inclined after they hear about this, they're like, ‘After I read your book, I did that for a little bit.… I talk to my kid and I ask what's delighting them.’ And it is my experience that when people are like, ‘yo, this is what I love’, that I'm inclined to be like, ‘oh yeah, what do I love?’.”
Another key element and outcome of this practice has been strengthening a sense of curiosity. Gay shared a conversation he had with Sharon Salzberg:
“I was talking with Sharon Salzberg a few days ago, and she said something along the lines of, ‘Despair is the result of knowing everything.’ But curiosity, wondering about how it's going to go, is something else... Not knowing how it's going to go might provoke all kinds of feelings. But when I feel curiosity, it invites a sense of, ‘okay, well, I guess I should check. I guess I should see.’ In the smallest way, we can all relate to this in our relationships. If I just know how a conversation is going to go, why am I going to have it? As opposed to being like, ‘well, I wonder how it's going to go. I guess I better fess up to the fact that I don't actually know everything about this other person.”
This curiosity and connection can also help us be with the inevitable pain of change, together. Gay says:
One of the ways that I think of joy is something that isn't separate from or an alternative to sorrow, but it's something that actually emerges from sorrow. Joy doesn't actually exist absent of sorrow. And one of the expressions of joy is the way that we help each other, how we carry each other through our sorrows. It's a kind of ground that things change—everything we love is going to be gone. Joy is as likely to make you weep as it is to make you dance—neither of which are more or less evidence of joy. But it does feel like joy comes from both, or joy might make you want to do both.
Check out the full interview in the app or wherever you listen to podcasts.