This summer was not an easy one for me. I witnessed calamity and turbulence in so many countries and communities around the world, including my own. Each day the news seemed to feature one heartbreaking story after another of loss and devastation. We are living in turbulent times.

There were many instances when what I read or saw filled me with sadness. It’s an instinctive reaction that my body-mind gives off when life (which I value) is threatened or wantonly disregarded. And then the disasters and destruction I see bear down on me, and I notice I begin to fear that ‘this can happen to me or those I love’.  

Some people advocate for turning off the news. And this is a helpful idea—if not turning it off, reducing exposure to it. But there is more to it than that. It’s not the news that is the issue, really. It’s how I interpret the news, how I interpret disaster and destruction and the calamity and death that can ensue.  

When I lurch into sadness or fear, what is really going on?  

My ego is doing the interpretation, and what it sees is interpreted as ‘bad’. Pain, chaos, uncertainty, greed, needless death and destruction…bad, a threat, something to be feared—“What if it happens to me?!” my ego then screams. 

But what is actually happening within me? I am witnessing the rise and fall of certain material phenomenon (an event), and I am interpreting what is essentially a ‘neutral’ event as good or bad, right or wrong. I give it all the meaning it has for me. And when I do, I oscillate between happy/sad, upbeat/negative, optimistic/pessimistic, depending on my interpretation of the event. It’s quite the rollercoaster ride, as I’m sure you’ve experienced.  

What happens when the desire is no longer there to participate in the rollercoaster, when there is a desire for a more consistently peaceful inner experience, when the trembling of fear-based reaction to whatever is witnessed is no longer seen as a useful response?  

It takes real work to be able to look upon all things with perfect equanimity and peace. And I do mean all things.  

I’m not yet convinced that as humans we will ever be completely free of emotional attachment. When we lose those and that which we love dearly, we will be overcome by sorrow and we will grieve. We will ache for our loss. We will be overcome by thoughts of what could not be because of that loss.  

Love is always the antidote to pain and fear. Turning my fears and worries and sorrows over to Spirit as they arise helps me return to love. And living lovingly each day is a wonderful, grounding assurance that should any calamities come to pass, that nothing that truly matters was left unattended.

Express What Matters

Though I may fall to my knees in sorrow, though I may be racked by pain, though I may grieve, beneath all the emotion of my beautiful humanity there is the knowing that when living in turbulent times, what matters most was given space in my life each day to be expressed.