Our theme of the month for April is Caring. There are two questions here: what to care for and about – and how to care effectively. Are there things we care about that we’d be better off being a bit more nonchalant about? Are there other things we should be paying more attention to? When is worrying a helpful way to keep us focused, and when is it simply useless and harmful anxiety?
Let’s look more closely at the premise I started with: we don’t all care about the same things – but there are some things we all care about. Marshall Rosenberg had a way of distinguishing between the sort of things we all care about and the sorts of things that some of us care about and others of us don’t. The things we all care about, he called, “needs.” Per Rosenberg, a need is not something we will die if we don’t get, it’s just something we all want – something we all care about getting – often in proportion to how long its been since we had some. So food and sleep are needs – increasingly so as the hours go by since we last ate or slept. Oxygen is a need – increasingly so as the seconds go by since our last breath. These are part of the sustenance need, which also includes shelter and exercise. We need to sustain ourselves.
The other eight universal needs are: Safety, love (which includes the need to love and the need to be loved), understanding or empathy, creativity, recreation, a sense of belonging, autonomy, and meaning. Everybody cares about those things. Where we differ is in our strategies for getting them.
Everything we do is in service of our needs – but some of our strategies work better than others. So if you’re thinking, “I need a new mobile phone,” that’s not really a need in this sense – it’s a strategy. Getting a new mobile phone is, you are thinking, a strategy for meeting needs of connection.
You probably grew up hearing a distinction between needs and wants. As a kid you might say you needed some toy or the latest cool gadget, and your parents would say no, you don’t need it, you just want it. You probably found that unsatisfying. So I’m saying, forget that. Forget the distinction between needs and wants. They’re all wants. Even just staying alive is a want. There is no helpful distinction between needs and wants.
Instead, the helpful distinction is between needs and strategies – between wants that everybody has, and the wants that are your particular means to an end, where the end is something everybody wants. So the parent, instead of saying, “you don’t need that toy, you only want that toy,” might say, “that toy isn’t a universal want, since not everybody wants the toy. So it’s a strategy. What is the universal need (or want) that you see this toy as a strategy for meeting?”
Then you can look at what’s behind the particular desire. Maybe there’s a sense of belonging. Or maybe its recreation, or creativity. Or a combination of several needs.
And once we put it that way, then we are positioned to think about whether there might be other ways to meet that need. Once you recognize your strategy as a strategy, and then identify what need it is a strategy for, then you’re less prone to getting attached to and stuck on that strategy. You are freed to explore alternative strategies for that need. It’s liberating.
Caring, of course, is what defines us, what makes us who we are. Yet caring can turn into cares – as in careworn, worn down by cares. And if we aren’t paying attention, then what we find ourselves caring about – as judged by the habits we live by – can be out of alignment with what is really conducive to a good life.
Yesterday morning, at the Zen meditation on Zoom that I lead starting at 6:00am, Tuesday through Saturday morning, I was sharing with the group some words from Charlotte Joko Beck saying that we honor and pay attention to “the god of comfort and pleasantness and security. In worshiping that god, we destroy our lives" (Joko Beck, Nothing Special). She pointed out that by caring too much about comfort, pleasantness, and security, we pick bad strategies. We can get drawn into “drugs, alcohol, high speeds, recklessness, anger” because these things seem to offer comfort, pleasantness, or security. They seem to assuage our “fear of encountering any kind of unpleasantness.”
Joko says:
“If we must have absolute order and control, it’s because we’re trying to avoid any unpleasantness. If we can have things our way, and get angry if they’re not, then we think we can survive and shut out our anxiety about death. If we can please everyone, then we imagine no unpleasantness will enter our life. We hope that if we can be the star of the show, shining and wonderful and efficient, we can have such an admiring audience that we won’t have to feel anything. If we can withdraw from the world and just entertain ourselves with our own dreams and fantasies and emotional upheavals, we think we can escape unpleasantness. If we can figure everything out, if we can be so smart that we can fit everything into some sort of a plan or order, a complete intellectual understanding, then perhaps we won’t be threatened. If we can submit to an authority, have it tell us what to do, then we can give someone else the responsibility for our lives and we don’t’ have to carry it anymore.... If we pursue life madly, going after any pleasant sensation, any excitement, any entertainment, perhaps we won’t have to feel any pain. If we can tell others what to do, keep them well under control, maybe they can’t hurt us.”Joko says that “every being on earth pursues” to some degree this “god of no discomfort and no unpleasantness.” And, “As we pursue it, we lose touch with what really is.” This pursuit inevitably fails. In the frenetic business of our pursuits to avoid pain, we lose touch with “the absolute wonder of what our life is.”
We begin to experience that wonder “only by contacting our own pain, which means no longer worshiping the god of comfort and pleasantness.” For Joko, experiencing our pain, paying attention to it, rather than “finding a place where we can shut the pain out,” is what leads to “surrender and opening into something fresh and new.”
Our biggest problem is the thought that we should have no problems. Problems and challenges are our life. We come more alive when we are with the pain than when we seek to avoid it. This is the practice of cultivating compassion. Passion, in its original sense, means suffering. We see that meaning in the Christian phrase, “the passion of Christ” – meaning the suffering and pain. So compassion is “com” – meaning “with” – and passion – meaning pain. Self-compassion is being with your own pain – compassion for others is being with others pain.
Sometimes there’s a fix. The pain of hunger just needs a little food. Sometimes there’s not – but rather than denial, just be with the pain.
David Brooks’ column this week was about people deliberately choosing what was uncomfortable. He talks about Haruki Murakami, who took up running. “By the late 2000s, [Murakami] was running six miles a day, six days a week every week of the year, and had run in 23 marathons, plus many other long-distance races, an ultramarathon and some triathlons,” Brooks writes. The thing is, running was often painful – miserable. Murakami’s memoir has lines like:
“As I ran this race, I felt I never, ever wanted to go through that again.”
And: “At around 23 miles I start to hate everything.”
And: “I finally reach the end. Strangely, I have no feeling of accomplishment. The only thing I feel is utter relief that I don’t have to run anymore.”
And: “It was draining physically, as you can imagine, and for a while afterward I swore I’d never run again.”
Yet he does run again. Brooks then says,
“All around us there are people who endure tedium to learn the violin, who repeatedly fall off stair railings learning to skateboard, who go through the arduous mental labor required to solve a scientific problem, who agree to take a job managing other people (which is truly hard) or who start a business (which is insanely hard).”He goes on to say:
“When it comes to the things we really care about — vocation, family, identity, whatever gives our lives purpose — we are operating by a different logic [from the logic of seeking pleasure and avoiding pain], which is the logic of passionate desire and often painful effort.”When he says “passionate desire” in this way, it seems to bring together the modern sense of passion and the original sense of passion as pain.
“People commit to great projects, they endure hard challenges,” not by anything remotely like a cost-benefit analysis, but “because they are entranced, enchanted. Some notion or activity has grabbed them, set its hooks inside them, aroused some possibility, fired the imagination.”
“The capacity to be seized” is an great talent.
“Some people go through life thick-skinned. School or career has given them a pragmatic, instrumental, efficiency-maximizing frame of mind. They live their life under pressure, so their head is down; they’re not open to delight, or open to that moment of rapture that can redirect a life.”If all we care about is pleasantness and security, we aren’t open to wonder and delight – openness to which also means being open to discomfort and pain.
The wonders of life come from being open – broken open – to all of life – the full catastrophe. Close off a part of it – like the pain – and you also close off the real wonder. That phrase, “the full catastrophe,” I take from the title of a book by Jon Kabat-Zinn, “Full Catastrophe Living,” – and he got it from “Zorba the Greek,” where Zorba says, "I'm a man who's got the full catastrophe" – meaning his life is full of joy, sorrow, love, loss, and everything in between. Kabat-Zinn uses this concept to highlight the idea of embracing life as it is – the full catastrophe that life is, with all its ups and downs. Embrace, rather than resist or avoid difficult experiences. Take in and pay attention to human experience in all its messy, imperfect glory.
Without the difficulties, without the pain, we wouldn’t cultivate resilience, and find our fulfillment and well-being. David Brooks’ column is interested in how that openness can lead us to be seized by what becomes our great life passion – in the sense of a great pain but also a great meaning and purpose in a life dedicated beyond reason to something: to running, or playing the violin, or scientific inquiry or writing. Kabat-Zinn is interested in how that openness can lead us to be seized by the simple wonder of a moment. Either way, that openness gets closed off when, as Joko Beck says, what we care about is comfort and pleasantness and security.
Consider Sisyphus, the figure in Greek Mythology condemned by the gods to Hades and eternal punishment. He had to roll a heavy boulder up hill. When he got it to the top, it would roll back down again, and he’d have to start over. He was condemned for all eternity to pushing a heavy boulder, and to an awareness of the futility of his labor.
The futility aspect is rather curious, isn’t it? We feel like if we get that boulder to the top of the hill, we’ve accomplished something – but if it doesn’t stay there for even a minute but rolls back down again – then it was all futile. But why is a boulder at the top of a hill an accomplishment anyway? Why is it any better to have it at the top than at the base of the hill? It’s really no more futile to have the boulder rolling down the hill than to have it staying perched for a while on the hilltop.
So if we forget about the futility part, then there’s just the pushing part. We are all Sisyphus, pushing our rock. It’s not a condemnation or punishment, it’s just each moment. Pushing the rock or watching it roll down. We’re all doing what we do, moment by moment. But then we add judgments and ideas. The hell isn’t in pushing the boulder but in creating ideas of hope and disappointment. It’s the idea that we shouldn’t have to be doing it that turns any activity into hell.
The French writer Albert Camus in his essay, “The Myth of Sisyphus,” offers an extended reflection on the lessons of this myth. Camus concludes, “We must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
“If we are totally what we are, in every second, we begin to experience life as joy” (Joko Beck 20) – whatever boulder we may be pushing. Experiencing life as joy doesn’t mean there’s no sadness. It means we are experiencing that full catastrophe. Sadness might be the opposite of happiness, but it isn’t the opposite of joy – it’s part of the joy, because it’s part of life.
There are those universal needs: sustenance, safety, love, understanding or empathy, creativity, recreation, belonging, autonomy, and meaning. Those needs impel us to devise strategies to meet them. And that’s our boulder to keep pushing on. That’s what we care about.
What we don’t have to care about is whether the boulder will stay on the hilltop. Or whether we can get someone else to push it for us. Or whether we can distract ourselves from the pushing, or forget about it with substances. Just push on. Pay attention to your pushing, pay attention to observing the wonder of the boulder rolling down the hill again – how elegantly it rolls!
If we stop thinking life should be other than exactly what it is, we find the joy in it. No, the boulder won’t stay on the hilltop. Who cares?
Amen.