“Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in the sight of all. Men will even give their lives if only the ordeal does not last long but is soon over, with all looking on and applauding as though on the stage. But active love is labor and fortitude, and for some people too, perhaps, a complete science.” Fyodor Dostoevsky,The Brothers Karamazov
I want the current administration to explode in a blaze of glory, and i want to be the one to light the fuse. But my hands bring me back to the patient work of making myself an act of love.
This is a post that I sent to my ukulele students.
Many people consider taking a music class at some point in their lives. Studying an instrument or using your voice in new ways can be a little bit challenging, and I think people think about doing these activities when things are peaceful, and they are feeling expansive, like they have some “wiggle room” in their schedule. That makes sense.
That being said, my own music practice has grown out of my tendency to focus on music at times in my life that were difficult. For me, playing music and singing is a powerful emotional regulation tool–when life is feeling chaotic or overwhelming, musical activity helps me focus on parts of myself that I can control and nurture.
I may have spent the whole day at work having to bite my tongue or not express my difficult feelings about my working atmosphere, but then I can come home and channel all of those feelings into a musical activity that helps to lower my heart rate, regulate my breathing, and stimulate my creative mind. I can learn to play a song that I then share with my friends or family, which creates a sense of shared experience, which also helps to relieve my stress and help me feel connected to my community.
So, even though taking on the challenge of learning an instrument might seem like an extra thing to have to manage in a busy schedule, that time that we spend making music can provide a welcome balance to our regular working life.
So far so good. After 2 weeks on meds and a consultation with the pharmacist, I doubled the original dose, and i don’t see increasing any more going forward. My sleep patterns have stabilized and I am actually sleeping more and deeper. This is probably in part due to the fact that I am no longer napping in the afternoon, so at night I am actually tired and fall right asleep.
My step count is on point, and for the last week I have averaged 5 miles a day. I am down 15 pounds from my January weight. I do sometimes forget to eat, but I’m not actually skipping meals, and I have less of a tendency to just clean my plate on principle.
This is all great, but what about my attention? This is a little more difficult to wrap up succinctly. I have continued to experience a decrease in “background noise” that would pull me away from a task. I have also noticed a subtle but unambiguous change in my connection with my current instrument, the ukulele. I have always had a difficult time internalizing and retaining patterns–I have to practice a lot to memorize and integrate new material, and even then it doesn’t always “stick.” It seems lately that the circuits seem to be firing a bit more smoothly. Not a dramatic change by any means, but noticeable and welcome.
What medication hasn’t helped with is the sense of panic and dread I feel from situational sources: caring for and managing the affairs of a loved one with dementia; a marked downward trend in enrollment in music classes, my source of income; parenting a neurodivergent teen who, like me, learns everything the hard way and navigates a world that wasn’t necessarily designed for him; and watching the failure of our justice system and legislature to stop the dismantling of our hard-won civil liberties, environmental protections, and social safety net. All I can do is focus on the task at hand and avoid ruminating, and with that I feel more vulnerable and see fewer options each day. My instinct for self-preservation has seemedly not increased with my ability to focus.
My mind’s tendency toward world-building seems to continue unchecked as well–there is an unrelenting “impossible dream” that a big part of my consciousness is trying to realize, which saps a great deal of the energy which I feel should go into organizing my activities into a sustainable livelihood. Well, that’s that. To be continued …
The mindset of the people dismantling our social and environmental protections is the mindset of people who go into National Parks and push over rock formations that took millions of years to form. It is a mindset that is incapable of awe, empathy, self-reflection, or vulnerability; that can only feel something when exercising power or control. There’s no point in asking why or trying to make sense of their actions–they will say one thing one day and the opposite the next. The only answer is a mindset of greed, hatred, and ignorance.
We can overcome this mindset in ourselves, through practices that promote awe, empathy, self-reflection, and vulnerability, and so spread these qualities through our interactions.
One of the things that makes the current crisis so difficult is that this particular class of disruptors as a rule do not mix with people who cultivate awe, empathy, self-reflection, and vulnerability. They would feel quite uncomfortable to find themselves among such people. Once this corrupted mindset takes hold in a government or society, it really takes sustained effort, a grand gesture, to overcome it. What will this grand gesture look like? Will we recognize the moment for action when it arises? Are we capable of such a grand gesture?
