Dwelling in Chaos

Practicing Equanimity

It was a threshold we didn’t fully understand, involving the usual passage from one year to the next — but that year was different. That year ALL of the numbers were changing, and too many were turning to zeros. Chaos and catastrophe were predicted. Calamity and confusion were expected.

Remember the Y2K scare? The “millennium bug?” Not a virus but a computer flaw in which programmers in the 1960s had skimped on then-scarce computer memory by coding the year with two digits instead of four. How would those programs, many of them crucial to our power grids, financial systems and air travel, compute the year that would follow 1999? Would they think it was 1900 instead of 2000? Would they crash in confusion? Would massive chaos be unleashed? Was this the apocalypse, humanly written into our own computer code?

As the end of the millennium approached, a foreboding sense of danger spread through the media and many homes, all because of a year with too many zeros. At a cost of millions of dollars in the U.S. alone, teams of digital code writers scoured large-scale computer systems, changing two-digit years to four digits. Computer companies provided Y2K compliant fixes for home users. Some households stocked up on food and water, preparing for a full disaster. Some joked about the end times, but anxiety often rode on the coattails of their laughter. Very few airplanes were up in the air at midnight on December 31, 1999, and I have never seen a more empty airport (or airplane) than when we flew home on January 1, 2000.

Why revisit this frenzy now, 24 years into the “new” millennium? Because the urgency of many stories in the media today reminds me of old urgencies, only greater and more multi-faceted now. Because the fear aroused by urgency has become familiar, maybe even standard, making it hard to step out of a mindset of worry. And because worry itself removes us from the present moment, precisely when we need to be especially attuned to what is happening now.

Meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg notices how much energy we disburse and lose by either wishing for the past or fretting about the future. Instead of fully dwelling in the present, she says we create “add-ons” to the stories we are in, regretting what did or didn’t happen in the past and, even more often, worrying about future events that are not sealed or certain. Many religious teachings warn against this presumption of a fixed future; perhaps none as poignantly as the crucifixion in Christian theology. The Easter story, celebrated last weekend, annually reminds us not to assume the future is entombed.

We are encouraged not to deny the state of our current reality but neither to deny the multiple possibilities embedded in it. To remain open to the many options present in every time, perhaps especially the most dire or chaotic ones. To remember that the next chapters of the story we are now living are not yet known and not yet written.

This is the gift of equanimity, the third thresholding skill named in Trusting Change. Letting go of our assumptions about what will or must come next. Loosening the certainty of our judgments – of ourselves and others and of the story we share – to make room for a possible change in direction. A plot twist. A transformation, in ourselves or in others. A reconciliation. An unexpected resolution or emergence.

Jazz harpist Park Stickney, visiting the Twin Cities recently, told a story as he introduced an original song titled, “Surprise Corner.” He described the car trips of his early childhood and the long afternoons riding in the back seat with his brother, both of them bored and increasingly impatient. Then his mother, opening the map in her lap in the front seat, would point to it and exclaim that they were approaching a place called “Surprise Corner,” which the two brothers had learned was a place where something unknown but good would happen. Sure enough. A short way down the road, their mother announced they were at “Surprise Corner!” — and she would pass back to her sons a new car game or activity that would occupy their interest for the next span of the trip.

Only years later, did Park Stickney realize “Surprise Corner” had not existed on any map, but could be found by regarding any time or place as a junction where anything might happen. Is it any wonder that a child taught to believe in “Surprise Corner” could grow up to become a jazz harpist? (It’s well worth listening to him playing this song or others; link posted at the bottom of this post.)

How do you remain open to surprises and let go of the “add-ons” attached to a story you are in now? How might you find your way through the chaos of this time to “Surprise Corner,” where the unexpected could still happen? Does equanimity – letting go of assumptions and judgments about what a story is about or where it is going – come easily to you, or is it hard to let go? What energy might you recover by releasing your focus on the past or the future to be more present to what is happening now?

To write about this, sit silently for a few minutes asking yourself, “what is happening now?” in your life, in the world, in your community? If you notice the story you tell is adding on – more assumptions or worries, more predictions or projections – to what is actually happening right now, gently call yourself back to this moment. Return to the present time, without assumptions or add-ons or worries. Begin with the words, “What’s true is….” and follow wherever it leads, noticing both what you write and what you experience as you write.

And…. do you want to visit (listen to) “Surprise Corner”? Enjoy this recording by Park Stickney as a soundtrack to your own travels to Surprise Corner and beyond.

All best,

Karen