Always Reacting

4.14.2024

Allow me an observation, prompted by this week’s news. Having lived in New York for many years, I’m generally a fan of the New York Times, but it does sometimes feel as if they are deliberately trying to give us heart failure. On Friday, along came an article about how Biden is inching up in the polls 😀, but then today, there’s a long piece about how, according to yet another poll, many voters see Trump’s years in office as more good than bad 😱. Maya, a restaurant worker from Canoga Park, California, says of Trump, “…if you look deep into his personality, he actually cares about the country … sometimes we need that type of person in our lives.” You can practically feel your brain tissue shearing as you try to comprehend how someone can say such a thing.  

A good poll: elated. A bad poll: depressed. That is no way to spend the next six months, or the long run up to 2030. There has to be another way. 

Teachers of meditation will tell you that the state of mindfulness is the clear awareness of what is happening at each moment. As it turns out, this is a very difficult thing to achieve, because, at any given moment, the minds of most of us look like Grand Central Station. The minute you try to stop and pay attention, the crowd surge carries you off, and before you’re even aware of it, you’re fifty feet down the platform.

Likewise, in our political and media environment, we are always being pushed around, always reacting to things: to this poll, to that poll; oh dear, Biden is old!  Or how unbelievable it is that Trump did this or that Mark Robinson said that.  

Better to evict all these people and polls from inside our minds. Don’t ignore them but put them out on the front step. Stop reacting to polls, whether good or bad. Stop reacting to the what-if’s and the fear mongering. 

This isn’t a matter of burying one’s head in the sand and ignoring it all. It’s possible to look at all these things in a clear-eyed way, but non-reactively. I’m aiming towards something like “appropriate political mindfulness”: severing the connection between stimulus and automatic response, not swept away by elation or despondency. 

This will do two things. First, it’ll preserve our own mental and physical health. Second, it’ll keep us from (re)acting on the basis of anger and anxiety. If we can do this, we’ll be better, more humane people, both for ourselves, and for others.

Let me know if you have any strategies for achieving this state of equilibrium, and have a splendid week!

Greg