the divine meditation newsletter: don't die wondering
I began this past year with the intention of contemplating death as a way to live more fully. It’s brought me to people who are more aware of their dying than many of us: those living with a prognosis and/or terminal illnesses.
I think about Andrea Gibson’s writing, who shares publicly about their cancer diagnosis, and writes like they could die tomorrow. I think so many of us turn to their work because we see ourselves in their experience: the courage (heart), the potency (presence), and the emotional risk taking (aliveness) of someone so present with the impermanence of living. They write that when asked about their bucket list, it’s the times when they’re fully present for life’s simplest moments that are the most magical. Moments like “hold[ing] the hospital’s elevator door open for a stranger minutes after I’ve received hard news” and “to walk like a person who will never forget the gift of walking.”
We connect to the preciousness of those small moments, because all of us are aware that we’re dying. It’s built into us, but that doesn’t make it a part of our daily consciousness. It’s a practice to remember that our lives will end, and to live like it.
A few years ago, I bought a yellow pin at a holiday market with the text, “DON’T DIE WONDERING” on it. I wore it one day as I ran errands at Target and saw looks on people’s faces that surprised me in the best of ways. My guess – or hopeful assumption– is that in a matter of seconds I was witnessing them take in the message and connect to what in their lives they really care about. For a moment, the shame cleared away. Awe stepped in.
When we connect to what really matters to us, there seems to be a soft opening in the eyes. My body feels like a couch that I allow myself to really rest into. The realization: I’m here. I’m really here with this precious, impermanent life. What will I make of it? It’s so easy to forget. And isn’t it interesting, that when we remember this life is impermanent, is when we feel ourselves settling into it the most?
The news of Trump’s reelection this past November felt devastating. I was not in the camp of folks who predicted this would happen. I felt the news immediately; that conscious feeling of your relationship to power shifting in an instant. What I was feeling seemed to understand more about the change ahead of us, than my intellect. I didn’t have much to say or contribute to the public conversation that amounted to more than, ‘this is bad.’ Meanwhile, my feelings were a litany of information. In the flood of fear, I found seconds of gratitude in, ‘Hey, I’m feeling. I’m not numb to this and I don’t want to be. Whatever is to come, I’ll really be here for it.’
These feelings came with their own flavor of “don’t die wondering.” Who am I called to be now? What is required of me/us? How can I be more committed to what I came here to do? I spent those first two weeks post-elections accepting that the reality I had grown accustomed to was dying and that a different reality was on its way. And that I was going to be rebirthed in the change, too.
I recalled a podcast I listened to months earlier between Brené Brown and Amy Webb. Webb specializes in making predictions about the future using quantitative data. She spoke about how people would refer to all of us who are alive right now as, “the group of people who lived through the great transition” because of three emergent technologies: artificial intelligence, wearable devices, and biotechnology. Just hearing that list makes me wanna touch some grass. Brown put this in terms I could more easily comprehend: “Imagine if the steam engine, electricity, and the internet all happened at the same time.” Webb resonated with the comparison. She shared that what this supercycle of technology means is that, “everybody alive today is going to go through an unprecedented amount of change.”
We’re going to live through a lot and the pace of that “a lot” (change) is quickening.
Unprecedented seems like our collective word for uncertainty 2.0. The change you don’t know or see coming. I was meeting with a local electoral organizer recently, who somberly joked post-election that he was “tired of living through unprecedented events.” I resonated, both of us unable to offer the other any solace that this was the last of it. It made me wonder if it would serve us to find new ways of understanding the unprecedented, especially if what we call unprecedented is actually happening all the time. And, if Webb’s prediction is accurate, it’s very likely that it’ll be happening with increased frequency.
A few years ago, I had a job where I wrote campaign emails for a national progressive Asian American organization. In January of 2020, we sent petitions to stop the Trump administration from going to war and placing sanctions on Iran. “Last week we braced for war,” I wrote. The terrifying uncertainty of state violence. A couple months later, I was writing emails about the COVID-19 pandemic– using words like uncertain to describe the situation– which, as we know, has resulted in over a million deaths in the U.S. alone. A few months later, the emails were naming the parallel crises of the pandemic, voter suppression, and policing in the U.S.
Now, four years since then, the genocides in Gaza, Sudan, and the Congo, unpredictable Hurricanes, and the second Trump presidency are the devastating uncertainty of today– and that’s just a short list of what I currently have my attention on. Do we ever truly exist outside of uncertainty and heartbreak? There is no ‘pure’ point in the distance of human grieflessness.
While I understand the emails I was writing were designed to get people to feel the urgency of the situation and take action, they were shaped by the very fear and violence we were responding to. How do we create change that directly engages with what we’re afraid of without becoming it?
Octavia Butler’s words come to mind, “all you change, changes you. God is change. Shape God.” How we change what’s not okay is how we ourselves are changed. To shape change is to be intimate with what you find most devastating, to feel how it has impacted you, and then to use your unique power to create conditions that make that devastation less possible. To fight what we fear is to be in a kind of relationship with it. I think what’s to come is asking us to be in an unprecedented relationship with fear.
It seems to me that our task becomes even more difficult to change what we’re afraid of, when we relate to our fears as the entire magnitude of our existence. It makes change feel impossible. In social justice circles, it’s common to hear people say the world is burning, on fire, and fucked up. Yes, there are humans making hell on earth for other beings every single day. But the world is not only that. I refuse to believe it’s even mostly that.
This conversation between Sendolo Diaminah and adrienne maree brown has lived with me since I heard it and reminded me of this truth:
Diaminah says, “white supremacy and capitalism wants us to believe that they are the most important thing going on, and that the whole world is against us. And I’m like, the whole world isn’t against us. Like, just in my yard, all of these beings are like, let me get you this good soil [...] my bees are out here doing their thing, not because they’re like ‘Hey, Sendolo, we exist for you’. But literally, them just doing what they’re here in the world to do is a force in our favor.
And living in the world as a Black person, as a queer person, one of the lies I think that we get told, is that we’re not the majority, that we’re this isolated group of people who needs to be afraid all the time. Because the whole world is against us. And what I get from being in nature all the time is a like, ‘we’re with you.’
Whenever someone says the word minority to me [...] my soma rejects it completely, because I’m just like, ‘Oh no, no, no.’ I’m a part of the majority moving towards life, and it is a minority of one species on this entire very vibrant planet that is moving against life. And I am not in that minority.”
Life coach Dr. Martha Beck offers an analogy for negativity bias as giving someone a box of 15 puppies with a cobra in it. ‘What would you pay attention to?’ she asks. The cobra, of course. We’re wired to place our attention (and therefore our energy) on what we fear –even if it’s the minority. The fear could easily become the whole thing. And sometimes, the fear is as real as the threat of the cobra! It’s a bit delusional to act like the puppies and cobra can co-exist safely. It needs its own place, or as my therapist Nathan Shara offered, the cobra needs to be moved to its own box habitat, away from the puppies.
How do we right size fear? In their book, What it Takes To Heal, Prentis Hemphill tells a story of being gripped by fear on a treacherous hike with their partner. “When I thought I couldn’t get to my feet again and said so, Kasha looked back at me with an expression I’ve never seen on another person’s face, something simultaneously understanding and uncompromising. ‘Become bigger than the fear,’ she said, slowly. She didn’t tell me not to be afraid or try to assure me there was nothing to fear. Instead, she was telling me to make room for my fear. Rather than become what the fear dictated, I could feel it and yet feel more.”
It’s exactly this practice that I believe is what’s asked of us to meet what’s next. That life’s joys and sorrows are held by something bigger, and we can become that bigness. It’s the reminders that we find in our gardens and our relationships that can right size the fear and the lies that get told about our existence.
I found myself called to practice this in my own small way during the holiday season. I’m estranged from my biological family and chose to spend the holidays with my chosen family. The reasons for my estrangement are heartbreaking: my mom cannot fully acknowledge the sexual abuse that I and others in our family have experienced from my father. Experiencing childhood sexual abuse and being told in so many ways to bury that truth is an awful form of betrayal.
This past year, my tears lived closer to the surface, and I’d find myself weeping into a bowl of oatmeal, more in touch with my heartbrokenness. As Charles Blow writes in his memoir, Fire Shut Up in My Bones, “tears flowed out of me from a walled-off place, from another time, from a little boy who couldn’t cry.”
And as I grieved, I was also falling in love with Thorne. Our love is opening and changing me daily. Being with Thorne is like feeling safe enough to play and delight in all 15 puppies, because they all have a wild knack for cobra whispering. Our emerging partnership continues to expand what I thought possible in love, yet deep down had longed for all along. My wholeness finding a home with their wholeness. A love that inspires the practice of love. After the election results, as all the fears came up, I found myself thanking the universe for bringing a healing love like ours into my life, to face this unprecedented future with. A love wide enough to carry us through what’s to come.
Love right sizes fear. So like the Grinch, this holiday season, I felt as my heart “grew three sizes” and the “true meaning of Christmas came through.” Thorne and I celebrated an abundant pagan christmas, known now as “elfmas.” We marked the season by creating new traditions with loved ones, like making natural garlands while drinking hot chocolate, sowing stockings, thrifting for presents, decorating the tree, and a brief lecture from yours truly on the indigenous european roots of christmas 🤓 to anyone who’d indulge me.
I felt my broken heartedness, and I also felt more. I am bigger than the most painful parts of my experience. We all are. Bayard Rustin once said, “the power of love in the world is the greatest power existing.” When we feel powerless because the small minority on this planet is causing great harm, can we remember that how we treat each other, how we love each other, is some of the greatest power we have? In a lifetime of unprecedented change, can we dare to be unprecedented with our love practice? Don’t die wondering!