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River View, Fear Optional

One day what she saw from her window thrilled her; with the next day’s news, it scared her. That’s when Sharon Salzberg discovered the uses of anxiety.

Last year I managed to procure that most rare and precious commodity: a sublet in New York City that was both magnificent and affordable. This beautiful loft was owned by Fred, a friend who had gone off to England for an extended meditation retreat. Located on the west side of town, the loft’s living room windows opened onto a panoramic sweep of the Hudson River. I was captivated by the view. To be able to look out at the river last thing at night and first thing in the morning, I slept on the living room couch. I wrote my landlord’s meditation instructor, a colleague of mine, to suggest half-jokingly that Fred might derive benefit from an even longer stay in England. Keep him there, I suggested, and I’ll just stay on here. Watching that river flow by, I sensed mystery, voyage, delight. I was so happy.

Then one day a friend sent me an e-mail asking if I’d heard the new warning about possible terror attacks on subways and trains. Thinking I really needed to keep up more, I turned on the television, located on the same wall as my wonderful river view. Right away I heard the newscaster’s voice say, “Warnings have been issued about possible scuba-diving terrorists.” I froze. Scuba-diving terrorists! Scuba-diving terrorists would need a body of water, wouldn’t they? I looked from the television screen to the river view, back to the television screen, back to the river view, and I sensed devastation, horror, menace. How can I manage to get Fred back here quickly? was my desperate thought.

Some people claim that all danger exists simply in one’s own mind, or contend that terror threats are merely the strategic tool of a political machine bent on distracting its populace. But life is made up of uncertainty. Each time we breathe out, we don’t know if we’ll breathe in again. Each time we risk stepping forward, we don’t know what we’ll encounter, but we can’t just idle where we are. Despite all our efforts to picture the unfolding of events as managed, orderly, fixed, we don’t know what will happen next.

But it makes no sense to let our actions be determined by fear’s blind rush, its choking certainty that everything is bad and will only get worse. The space fear carves out for us to reside in is very small. Last year I could have let my blast of worry about the river overwhelm everything else and moved inland. The year before, living in New York City right after September 11, I was startled by the degree of strategizing that went on to try to manage a world revealed to be spinning well outside our control: “If I don’t cross that bridge at that time, I’ll be okay.” “As long as it’s not rush hour when I take the subway, things will be fine.” Yet when what we fear can come in any form at any time, safety becomes a psychological or spiritual destination rather than a physical one. Finding our inner strength, our love for one another, our aspiration to make this a better world is the only sure way to survive with our hearts intact.

I’ve recently learned a new term from friends who work in federal agencies in Washington, D.C.—shelter in place. Shelter in place is the opposite of evacuation, and it’s used in the event of a chemical, nuclear, or biological attack, when it’s not safe to go outside. When a shelter-in-place drill is ordered, people go to some designated windowless space, with their supplies of water and food and clothing, and stay there until they are told it’s safe to leave. Before I knew what the term meant, I found the sound of it inspiring, even uplifting—like Make your home wherever you are. Let your deepest understanding be your sanctuary, even in bad circumstances. Safety is not where you are, it’s what you do about where you are. That deeper sense of shelter in place is what I’d always longed for spiritually and had aimed for steadily.

I know that regardless of whatever outward measures any of us takes, we are likely to still be afraid. We live in times of immense turmoil and anxiety. Whether the threat is scuba-diving terrorists, new diseases, biological attacks, personal heartache, or what The Wall Street Journal suggests we should be most afraid of in terms of daily-life casualties—stairs—our lives are full of real, potential, and imagined hazards. Because of this omnipresent truth, I believe that what we need to do right here and now is work to retain our faith. We can do this no matter what our religious orientation, or lack of one, by remembering that everything is changing all the time. This is the positive face of uncertainty. Daily reflection or meditation will remind us that if we look closely at any painful emotion or difficult situation, it is bound to change—it’s not as solid and inert as it might have seemed. The fear we feel in the morning may not be present in the afternoon. Hopelessness may be replaced by calm, or even a little bit less hopelessness. Even while a challenging situation is unfolding, it is shifting, varied, alive. Once we see the inherent change in our experience, we see that we’re not trapped, that we have options. Then, even if we are afraid, faith can arise.

Faith is the quality that allows us to find a way to go on, to feel empowered, to—no matter what—keep on trying. This is not a sentimental faith that everything will be just fine, according to our wishes or our timetable. Rather, it is an awakened faith that gives us the courage to go into the unknown, the remembrance that nothing is fixed, and the understanding that as long as we are alive, possibility is alive. It is the power of faith that inspires us to step forward into the center of our lives—to participate, to link up, to reach out to others and let others reach out to us, to work for a better world. And it is the vitality of faith that tells us, however easy it is to forget or be overcome by fear, that the place for communicating, for loving, for sheltering, for trying, is right where we are.

Now I remind myself, while feeling afraid, to love life anyway, to retain the certain knowledge that I will die someday and use that to open to the preciousness of what I see and touch and feel right in front of me. Now I might feel afraid but am determined to have that fear serve as a counterpoint to my tendency to procrastinate—if I have to apologize, tell someone “I love you,” try to make a difference, I need to do it without delay. Now I want fear to liberate me instead of victimize me—to have it free me to go beyond embarrassment and habitual social stricture and hollow expectations to fully live my life, nothing held back. To venture to love. To enjoy every river and all friendships and each drop of air.

 

Originally published in the June 2004 issue of 'O' Magazine