My wife and I plan to have dinner at Yum Thai on Nov. 6, the day after the election. Here’s why:
Several weeks ago I noticed that I was feeling anxious about the election. I had nightmares about what would happen to our society if Donald Trump had another four-year try at widening the polarization in our country.
I realize that MAGAs feel the same way about Kamala Harris, which increases my anxiety even more, because everyone seems to have this apocalyptic sense that the nation will go to hell if the other side wins. When the perception is that the stakes are that high, there’s always the temptation to frame the other side as the enemy, and when the other side is the enemy, almost any tactic is acceptable.
I never hear politicians saying, “I will work for you” anymore. The rhetoric is always “I will fight for you.” Not a good place to be, spiritually.
So I was feeling this dark cloud of anxiety hanging over me.
When I shared my feeling with a friend, he replied, “I let go of that. I’ve done what I can do to influence the outcome of the election, and I’m powerless to change what will happen, so I just let it go.”
I envied my friend. I wish I could let go, but I am having a hard time doing so.
My friend put a Harris/Walz sign in his front yard. He even went to Wisconsin one Saturday and knocked on doors on behalf of the Vice President. He clearly exhibited the “courage to change what he could,” so intellectually I understood his statement about letting go.
Emotionally, however, I was having a hard time.
You see, my wife and I wrote 200 postcards to voters in the swing state of Georgia, spent over fifty bucks on stamps and mailed them on Oct. 15. We had done more than most people to be influencers, but that, of course, did not relieve my sense that the outcome was out of my control.
You know what I mean?
It’s like watching your favorite football team with a 2-point lead with 4 minutes left in the game and the other team (aka “the enemy”) has the ball on their own 40 yard line. Your sense that all is well in the universe is out of your hands and in the hands of 11 overpaid athletes on defense.
When I’m watching a game like that, I try to calm myself. “It’s only a game,” I tell myself. “Being anxious is silly. You are loved by your family and friends; you live in a free land of abundance; God is good all the time.”
But I remain anxious.
So I told my wife how I was feeling, and she responded with empathy and we began to brainstorm tactics for reducing my feeling of foreboding.
My friend is confident that Kamala Harris will win. I’m glad for him, but I don’t share his optimism, so my wife and I agreed that my friend’s confidence would not help me.
So one small thing we decided to do was to plan on having dinner at Yum Thai, one of our favorite restaurants, on the day after the election — pot stickers, sesame chicken, Thai iced coffee. It was part of our attempt, really my attempt, to acknowledge that my anxiety was my problem more than being dependent on circumstances like who won the election. So one of things over which we did have control was planning to have something to look forward to. A small thing, really, but something over which we did have control.
A Buddhist name Thich Nhat Hanh tells a story about the boat people during the Vietnam War (Vietnamese call it the American War) who were, much like the migrants who arrive at our border today, trying to escape the violence and chaos they were experiencing at home.
Thich said that many of the overcrowded boats capsized when they got into the open ocean and the people drowned. It wasn’t because of the waves, Thich said, but because the people in the boat panicked.
We all face big, frightening waves in our lives. Worries about going out of business, going through a divorce, a diagnosis of cancer, an election going the wrong way.
Viktor Frankl was a Holocaust survivor who wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning that it’s not what happens to us that gives meaning to our lives but how we respond to what happens to us.
The people in Asheville, North Carolina were victims of terrible flooding, which was out of their control. What I’ve been hearing on the news is that many residents of that town are choosing to respond by embracing the agency they have left to love their neighbors, to commit themselves to working together to recover.
Ten years from now, I hope that what they will remember more than the flooding that was out of their control was how, as a community, they responded.