Politics & keeping your sanity

May is Mental Health Awareness Month, so before I get into anything else, this is always a good share: Ask Take This: how to support a friend with depression and more. (Thank you, Bill!) Mental health challenges come in a wide variety, and this is a great article on being a good friend no matter what someone is dealing with.

Second, last year about this time I started a pushup challenge for Mission 22 from a friend and started conversations about taking better care of our veterans. Still very relevant today. What I like best about this kind of challenge is (in addition to donating and working for better social services) raising awareness can help directly: the more people think about what they can do, and dispel the myths and stigma around mental health, the better we will tend to be toward each other. 

Which brings me to today's thoughts. This year I'm focusing on a hard lesson for me personally: staying engaged with civic dialogue and civic action in a healthy way.

How the heck do we even read the news and just take care of our mental health? Problems piling on from "staying engaged" can seem to strain our capacity for empathy, patience, and just dealing with difficulty. It feels like this year is particularly bad in the United States. Even if that were just the impression we were getting from TV, social media, and Thanksgiving dinner, we've still got some tough questions to face:

• How would we like to be treated by friends and family who disagree with us?
• How are we treating them? Is the Golden Rule enough?
• What would we like kids to learn to do to resolve differences, reach compromise - or react when things don't go smoothly, or they face intolerance and unfairness?
• What are we doing to take care of ourselves when things get to us?
• How do we keep from confusing venting (or "winning points") with trying to actually share understanding, improve our relationships, or build support for good ideas?
• How do we keep from shutting down when we're needed - by our friends, family, community, world?

I don't know how to say how urgent this all is to figure out, except this way: Politics is people - government is people. I can't imagine we'll get far without acknowledging that the whole thing and how the world works is tangled up with our day-to-day relationships, our day-to-day impulses, differences and how we deal with them, disappointments and wrongdoing and what it does to us.

If age-old aggression still finds a place to be nurtured in my own heart, how can joy and peace in this world ever be found?

I am working on remembering that I need to both take care of myself, and not shut down to the troubled world. Improving the system isn't a far-off concept, separate from us. It's the same as improving all these things that happen between me and other people. Both inching us towards a better society is needed - and also dealing sanely with inevitable human mistakes, wrongdoing, not living up to what we wish others to be and what we wish ourselves to be. Our processes, plans, rules and culture aren't separate from us and our messiness, The System was never some other entity. It's friends, families, strangers. Kids watching you.

It's you, and me, dealing with things that seem overwhelming, frustrating, never-ending - sometimes needing a break, or support, or forgiveness, or a change - and deciding to return and keep trying to do something good anyway.

I am working on upholding what I feel is most important (compassion for others, not letting frustration and anger consume me) and at the same time, fighting for what is right. On one hand, there's an impulse to be very righteously angry, and I feel that is understandable - hot things burn, injustice hurts. On the flip side, my guess would be, for someone to say "I don't care about politics" is a defensive impulse, when people are trying to protect themselves against this overwhelming feeling about what's going on by shutting off. Understandable as they may be, I think these extremes - getting addicted to anger, hardening, shutting off - would be a mistake. They would ultimately wear us down and cut us off from doing anything useful, or what may be more important, from living whole lives open to all the good we can do and see that's wrapped up with the experience of living, of relating to other people who are inherently imperfect. What can we do deal healthily, one step at a time, with both the wonders and the troubles of humanity? How do you take care of yourself, and get back up to keep going?

"We can help this troubled world. If these teachings make sense to us, can we commit to them? In these times, do we really have a choice?" - Pema Chodron