Thich Nhat Hahn died recently, at 95. Maybe you never heard of the guy, but then again maybe you have, as it was he who brought us mindfulness, as mentioned on the covers of all those self-help magazines nowadays, there by the supermarket checkout counter. Hanh was, in fact, the Elvis and Babe Ruth of the Buddhist-MIndfulness Industrial Complex and its multiple yoga offshoots, a movement that has blessed us with any number of meditation-related workshops and weekend retreats and spiritual centers and all the books and related publications so necessary to keep such things going. Lest that sound too flippant, it must be said that mindfulness and meditation are practices of tremendous potential mental health benefit to anyone who partakes. But the Buddhist monk’s obit might not have caught your eye the way Elvis’s or the Babe’s would, and there are reasons for that.
Live in the moment! Clear your mind of all that troubling thought-clutter that messes you up emotionally and spiritually! Pay attention to the immediacy of your senses! In the ‘60s a popular phrase was “get out of your head!” THN systematized that into a whole way of being and a million meditators – and well-meaning believers and a few entrepreneurs seeing a market – spread the word, which in most cases was a very good thing. Mindfulness also fostered a school of therapeutic practice in mental health circles, which is how I became familiar with some of the techniques. Or somewhat familiar.
There are currently two bumper stickers on our car, one of which reads: Don’t believe everything you think (the other reads: Humankind: Be Both). As a very undisciplined meditator and one-time subscriber to the magazines and reader of some of the books, my own primitive takeaway focuses on the value of that one concept, and yes I’m like so many who prefer to having complex notions reduced to a bumper sticker, when possible. Meditation, if you keep it up even haphazardly, at some point can enable you to gain perspective on how your mind, with its tireless production of every manner of thought, all too often comes at you with assumptions that either get you all worked up or totally bummed out, based on nothing but your own awesome powers of abstraction. Donald Trump and the pandemic and now potential nuclear armageddon have, at times, given most of us dramatic demonstrations of this process, but we each also have our own poisons, some of them very personal, that can endure for a lifetime, with the world ready to hand us a few more at any time.
Of course on some level the horrors of the pandemic are real, along with home sapiens wretched mistreatment of one another (as well as other species) the world over, yesterday and now and forever. The rich and powerful have run things since the beginning of agriculture and complex human societies, and they’ve gamed the system to their own advantage all along, though the methods keep evolving. Racial and religious and cultural animosities play right into this game, fueled by people’s inherent insecurities about themselves, with politics providing the necessary tools to engineer it. And now we’ve got the impending doom of our species, if not most of biology as we know it, which gets mostly lip service thus far from those who might change the course. It’s all so darn gloomy! So how does one cope?
Chances are you’ve got a few methods that work for you. As a mental health guy I once made a living helping people find these, folks who struggled with extraordinary burdens like poverty and histories of trauma, which many in my own privileged world have been mostly blessed to avoid. I offered meditation but there were very few takers. They did much better just sharing and learning to question their most destructive thoughts. We talked about how everybody, even they, had a right to joy and that there were ways to find it. I like this quote from Karestan Koenan, a professor of psychiatric epidemiology: “When you’re treating depression, one of the biggest things you can do is behavioral action, and that means basically getting people to do stuff.”
So ravinginbeantown, here, is about the stuff I do. It’s about observing the natural world in my yard and around Jamaica Plain and the greater Boston neighborhood, and about items of interest as seen from the seat of a bicycle more often than not, as riding and old bikes have been a major love for the past 50 years, since when some of those old bikes were brand new. It’s about what turns up in the Boston Globe sometimes, especially items I think people might overlook, like the obit of a Buddhist monk famous to some but unfamiliar to many. It’s about weird-looking vegetables from our plot at the Paul Gore Beecher Street community garden, which talk sometimes, and Gumby and Pokey who are sometimes part of that. It includes pictures, because I love to photograph things. It’s about finding an antidote for facing the pain of witnessing all the ambition, violence, hatred and greed which troubles the world, which sounds kind of grandiose and perhaps overly ambitious in itself, which makes it kind of ironic. But sometimes ambition can be a good thing; even TNH must’ve known that. And I am a big fan of irony.
It’s also about mundane things like just staying busy in retirement and facing the indignities of old age and sometimes pondering Erik Erikson’s eighth and final stage of psychosocial development, which he poetically labels as Integrity vs Despair, which in other words begs the question: “was yours a life well-lived or are there regrets?” Now that’s one helluva question; I had multiple conversations with clients over the years about how regret is a poison that can just eat you up, and how bad decisions invariably looked like a good decision at the time, which doesn’t mean coping with regret is easy. On a personal level it’s one thing but any honest person of the older generations must also look at the state of the world we are handing down to those inheriting it, and not feel especially proud. Despair is one respectable response, most certainly, but it’s not the only one and I’ve yet to decide if apologies are in order, and maybe some of ravinginbeantown will be about that.
In the end, of course, this will be just another piece of word-junk-with-pictures floating in the blogosphere, which itself has been much transcended by Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and Tiktok and we know the Next Big Internet Thing is coming sometime, just you wait. I hope you find ravinginbeantown worth your time, at least now and then.
By the way, today it is early March and recently we hit a milestone here in JP whereby I heard the first tentative territorial pewpewpews of the Cardinal boys. Spring is here! This is a big deal, and you’re learning of it first on this blog. Or perhaps not. John