DESPAIR

I have been thinking about despair since reading an opinion piece in the Review section of last Sunday's New York Times by Michelle Goldberg, a writer whom I much admire. Her article, Democracy Grief is Real, struck a chord with me because I have been experiencing precisely the feeling she describes, as have many of us on the liberal side of American politics. She calls it grief. I call it despair.

Grief, as I understand, is about something that already happened. Fair enough. Too much has already happened in this era of Trump to undermine every value I myself hold dear. For me, though, it's more about what might happen--or continue to happen--in the future. It feels like the bad guys are winning all the time through sheer ruthlessness, and there's nothing we can do to stop them. As one of them said recently, with the galling truculence of the impenitent, "Get over it." With the assumption they had already won.

Despair, it seems to me, is the result of continuing attachment to outcomes other than those I expect or want. My mind constantly creates the illusion of control, as though I can somehow assure the outcome of a particular situation in a way that is favorable to my point of view, and each time it does I'm proven wrong by the actual result. When I'm confronted with this reality just once or twice, or even a few times, it's called disappointment. When it's chronic, when it happens repeatedly, especially with the same or a similar set of facts, it turns into the deeper feeling of despair, which is an unpleasantly persistent form of suffering.

Like many of us today, I suspect, I am deeply attached to the return to some kind of rational norm in our political life. The lies, the duplicity, the breaches of both decorum and trust, the disregard for the law and the absence of human compassion I perceive on one side of the spectrum seems to me indisputably clear and undeniable. The despair I feel derives from the clash between my judgment--no matter how "right"--and the realization that it makes no earthly difference to the situation, and that those I judge continue, despite me, to thrive in their malfeasance.

Meditation helps. It allows me not only to recognize the illusory nature of my feeling, but also to distance myself from a reality over which I truly have no control. Perhaps, I tell myself, if I had meditated longer (than my 25-year daily practice), with greater frequency and deeper concentration, perhaps I would have more success in maintaining my equanimity on a daily basis. The truth is that it's a struggle. In our current circumstance the mood is powerful, invasive. The fact that I share it with so many others like me makes it no more tolerable. What I'm left with is the need to accept it for what it is, acknowledge its source and, when I can, to let it go.