SUMMARY OF TRYING KLEIN’S MINDFULNESS
Briefly examining each of my tribes, each community that has been important to me, has been good for me. I recommend the exercise to anyone else. It makes me realize that the national polarized tribes of MAGA and liberal, red and blue, is only one of the many tribes that I belong to and probably not the most important and that is has taken an outsize place in my emotions.
Another tribe that I haven’t mentioned is my nuclear family and then my extended relatives in all directions, some of whom voted for Trump and many who didn’t. They are family and family is family no matter what they believe. We are bound together by the people we love most and that outweighs how we have voted. This extends to my extended family in England and Germany and friends around the world all of whom are people I like being with and listening to no matter what they say. If you care for someone you don’t spend your time trying to straighten them out. You are just glad to be with them.
I am realizing how many circles of people that I have something in common while realizing that we all come to our strong beliefs from our parents or our culture or who we marry or from our own very different experiences of life. Of course we don’t always agree and very likely our differences aren’t between right and wrong but between our very different experiences of life and that very likely every experience, even competing ones, has elements that enrich us and elements that block us and that only by listening to each other can we sort things out.
I am surprised that I could feel empathy and warmth toward people in the armed services tribe and toward people in the MAGA tribe. And I was pleased to feel warmth in the academic tribe even when I didn’t belong, and I feel grateful for my missionary childhood upbringing even though it made it hard to fit into the culture of the United States.
I am not going to change any of the cultures of the tribes that make me uncomfortable, all I can do is to make my own way and accept the different ways of others because that allows me to accept them as fellow human beings and not be fearful of them or feel threatened.
But most of all what I think I have learned from trying this exercise of reviewing the tribes I have belonged to is that because of my DNA, my upbringing, the cultures I have lived in and my own experience is that I, like everyone, am making my own idiosyncratic passage through life, that what in my DNA makes me feel most alive and the uniqueness of my own experience, means that I have to find my own way along and can’t relay on any of these tribes to guide me.
For example, Klein’s mindfulness, which I call awareness, has two effects. The first is that for me the process of feeling along to awareness feels good, just the process. I don’t feel along to awareness to get somewhere. I do it because it is fun to do. It is worth doing just for the process. But the second thing that mindfulness or awareness does is let me be aware objectively and without strong emotion and the process of doing that is a way of handling and reducing intense emotion and being able to think clearly about where I am. It greatly reduces intense polarizing feelings. And the third things is that when I observe the different tribes I have been in and either felt I belonged or didn’t belong it makes me realize that I have a number of different allegiances. Belonging to liberal democrats is not the only one. In fact, I realize that because of my DNA and upbringing and the cultures I have lived in and my experiences in life that I don’t have the same identity as anyone else around me. And this frees me not to be committed to any tribe.
But in addition to that I realize that the things that make me feel alive are not necessarily the same as for other people. More than other people I enjoy writing and feeling my way to awareness of where I am. I write five or six hours a day. Most people don’t. Secondly, I have come to realize that empathy for other people, even people with very different values from my own, makes me feel very alive. And that makes it much easier to accept people with different beliefs, even opposite beliefs from my own. A third thing is that I have needed to escape from American culture at least every other year and have done that all my life. Since turning 83 I have been traveling a great deal, spending a month in another country at least 15 times. This is another way that my life is different from most of my 80 year old friends. They dont’ travel, they say, because of the physical difficulties, but I have to travel to be free from American cultural conventions even if briefly or I suffocate. This means that is is much easier for me to accept people from other cultures and also indicates that I don’t fit very well in the American tribe. And finally I have discovered in old age that I like living as simply as possible, with few things, living out of a carry on when traveling which means that I don’t fit very well in American consumer culture.
Realizing all of this frees me from American polarization which is actually a great relief. As part of this letting go I have stopped watching TV news. Kathe used to watch MSNBC obsessively. Since Kathe died I haven’t watched it at all, even though I know I agree with must of their views. I don’t watch it in order not to be riled up and angry all the time. I do read the New York Times and Washington Post which are calmer and quieter. They also have a great deal news that is non political which diverts me from politics.
So Klein’s suggestion to be mindful has been a good one for me. It calms me down and protects me from being caught in polarization which seems almost manic to me. It helps me to think more clearly and allows me to realize that I have to make my individual way and to not get caught in the groupthink that happens when I feel a part of a polarized group.
It also allows me to figure issues out for myself. It lets me see, for example, that there are two or more sides to most issues and that neither one is wrong. Take for example one of the most polarizing of issues, abortion. From a liberal perspective it is an issue of women’s choice when to have children as well as being responsible for their own bodies and not being told what to do. But from a MAGA perspective, when you believe that life begins at conception, it is a question of murder. The perspectives start with different assumptions and each make sense based on those assumptions. And how you choose which choice is right for you really has very little to do with which party you belong to and more to do with your own personal values and life experience.
On the issue of people discovering that they were born the wrong gender and in the wrong body, it is possible to affirm transgender reality without insisting that a male who realizes they are a female be able to play sports in a women’s team.
The issues of immigration are complicated by many factors, home country violence, global warming, unfair divisions between the rich and the poor, family relationships and many more. But the fact is that almost all people would prefer to live a decent life surrounded by friends and relatives. Most people would prefer to stay at home. So there must be some kind of rational solution that would let them do this. Demonizing immigrants is not the solution.
But the problem is that when we are committed to a polarized group we can no longer calmly and rationally find our own way, we have to fit into the values of the group.
So I recommend Klein’s suggestion of mindfulness.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 