I don’t know if you’ve been following UK politics but its such a mess, so broken, so uncertain that it’s been severely spooking the markets and our economy is in dire straits.
In the summer Boris Johnson resigned after coming under increasing pressure over his behaviour and actions. Liz Truss, his successor, lasted only 6 weeks. By the time you read this we will have yet another Prime Minister! If I wrote this as a screen play it would get thrown out for being so unbelievable.
But this is not a political column.
The reason I mention it is because it exemplifies uncertainty. No one knows what is going on, or really what will happen in the future.
Uncertainty causes panic, rash reactions, anger, fear; all the emotions of defensiveness and protection. It kicks in our survival instincts. Stress is the body's reaction to feeling threatened or under pressure. There is a lot of stress around.
We look on with incredulity, powerless, worried, fearful, lacking control. We want things to be certain, sure, steady. It seems we haven’t learned the lessons of the pandemic.
The poet Keats came up with the idea of ‘negative capability’. He described it as the ability to be in uncertainties, mysteries and doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. Negative here implies the ability to resist explaining away what we do not understand. Keats believed that the world could never be fully understood, let alone controlled.
Keats lost most of his family members to an infectious disease, tuberculosis, that would take his own life. In the same way the COVID-19 pandemic turned the worlds of many people upside down, the poet had developed a deep sense of life’s uncertainties.
Can you remember that feeling in the midst of the pandemic? The uncertainty, the fear? And even now our world is reeling. We crave normality, but normality has shifted. This world wide experience has taught us that nothing can be taken for granted, everything is a shifting tide. We have learned to live with uncertainty. We may not like it, but in many ways we have become more adept with embracing impermanence, it has become so much more real for us.
Uncertainty is here to stay. The only really solution is patience, understanding and love. And to know that even this situation will change. To let go of certainty takes courage and humility.
I’ve recently ordered the book Luminous Darkness: An engaged Buddhist approach to embracing the unknown by Deborah Eden Tull. In this book she explores a culture which values light and activity over slowness and darkness. This is reimagining of darkness in life as a way of offering stillness, serenity and regeneration. Darkness may come with grief, fear and uncertainty, but also with curiosity, compassion and potential to heal.
We spend very little time in physical darkness, 60% of the world is artificially lit at night. We are losing our dark skies. And when we are in deep darkness we can sense our own humility. Maybe you would like to take some time over the coming two months to hibernate a little, take time to be in comforting darkness, unknowing, rest.
Do you know the signs your body gives you when it needs rest…?
Yesterday I did an 3 hour workshop with her called Radical Rest: the innate wisdom of slowing down with Sangha Live. Who isn’t in need of rest? Maybe you’ve done a lying down body scan and find yourself drifting off to sleep pretty quickly. How much our body and mind needs to rest!
In meditation, we do not have to be in a state of doing, but can be in a space of rest, spaciousness, welcoming silence - welcoming whatever arises. We assume effort is required for all we do in life and we can often bring this approach to meditation (sometimes effort is required to help with concentration) but we can also over effort, believe that we are trying to get somewhere, achieve some goal. We can reframe our approach to meditation as nothing to do but be in the uncertain now and ask: what is this?
Our negativity bias always looks for something wrong, or searches for more - this moment is not enough - or that there is something we have to do. But meditation and deep rest allows us to switch this instinct off, be with uncertainty and not knowing. This is a regenerative and restorative way of living.
‘Light and darkness are a pair, like the foot before and the foot after in walking’ (Dogen)
Before I leave you I’d like to suggest you take some slow time out to listen to this podcast from Plum Village on handling change and impermanence. By the way, Plum Village also have a great little app with lots of resources in it including many recordings for deep relaxation.