NOTICING Living A Parallel Life
Making deliberate choices side-by-side with executive orders
If I don’t want to be driven into a cave of fear. If I don’t want to live my days under the bedcovers. If my instant reaction to the morning headlines drives a hole in my heart, I have to find a way to focus on what is immediately important for the day ahead. The first-graders to whom I am devoted need my full attention, despite very bad news outside of their world. To refocus, I have to claim myself. I need me to do me. Before I leave for school, I’ll paint for 10 minutes. A quick exercise to calm myself. Once on the way, I’ll look at the sky. After teaching, I’ll bake a cake.
A tune springs into mind: a few of my favorite things. All the above are some things I do to live each day parallel to the terrors imposed by the new administration. Four weeks in and it’s a coast-to-coast train wreck.
How are you managing walking the dog, doing the laundry, preparing dinner, putting the kids to bed, meeting work deadlines as the siege of the President and his unelected hatchet man break every damn law in their sightline? (I mean, Stop breaking the law! It’s not that damn hard.) How are you keeping your nearest neighbors close? How are you helping them to ward off nightmares, or at least console? I told you some of my few favorite things. What are yours? This is not a casual question.
In my last two Substacks I proposed that we welcome into our daily lives a Third Way. This Third Way centers on the emotion of awe. Awe is now known as the eighth emotion. Scientists are studying this singular emotion, and a growing body of research suggests that experiencing awe may lead to a wide range of benefits, from happiness and health to perhaps more unexpected benefits such as generosity, humility, and critical thinking. Experiments in 26 cultures around the world show that awe can repair body and mind. It can deepen social relationships. It can metamorphose our sense of loneliness into the rhythms of being part of a community.
The emotion of awe feels good. But no one has to take scientific findings as gospel; it’s in your body and you know it when you sense it. You are aware of, and humbled by, the vast complex world that we share, not as political partisans but as a species.
One example of the experience of awe is seeing the murmuration of starlings. Leaderless, agile, swift, and balletic displays of thousands of starlings massing together at dusk, protected from predators, do astonish.
How does this leaderless tribe do it? Their capabilities are the result of each single bird keeping close to seven adjacent neighbors. That’s it. No leader. They keep an eye on the edge. And move in concert with the seven nearest neighbors to swerve in grace, power, and surpassing magnificence.
And there is this, too. The truly useful book, The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central-Eastern Europe by the Czech dramatist, political dissident, and later statesman, Václav Havel. Written illegally as samizdat in October 1978, Havel was imprisoned by his government because of his political writing. After prison, Havel was voted into office as President of Czechoslovakia.
The key point of The Power of the Powerless that speaks to our American moment now is Havel’s explanation of what he called the parallel polis. Havel’s ideas were the result of the parallel life he himself lived before and during his imprisonment. Havel shows us how we can resist totalitarianism and keep ourselves whole. How is living in the face of falsehood without rolling over and playing dead possible? Reading The Power of the Powerless fills me with awe because here is a road map for those of us who feel, like it or not, powerless, because of Havel’s courage and pragmatic understanding of power itself.
To choose a Third Way is to be deliberate about what exactly will keep us sane, civil, and generous in sharing life’s pleasures as we witness those summarily fired without cause, fellow human beings deported, and programs already approved by Congress denied life-saving funds. As we go about our day, keenly aware of the wreckage happening blow by blow, in our bones we know fear. What we see on the news might just happen close to home. Or, in one’s home. When we live a parallel life we live in one’s own truth—living with a personal sense of what matters—at the same time that we keep ourselves safe. All the while a vigilant eye is kept on the authoritarian regime. It takes practice to live with this nerve-wracking, sleep-depriving, devastating mess.
And still, no matter what, we can make comfort, reassurance, and doing good anyway, happen. And still, no matter what, we can notice one’s own moments of awe—big or small—when they too happen.
I ask a friend how the barrage of the first four weeks of the new administration impacts her life. How is she holding close to a few of her favorite things? Then I ask if she would tell me about an experience of awe that she’s had.
O is Ukrainian. She grew up under Soviet rule. Often, she and her classmates were taken out of school to work on collective farms. Russian was the primary language at her university. “Only three professors taught in Ukrainian.” Her news sources about the war in Ukraine are Ukrainian media, family and friends. “It doesn’t look good.” She tells worried friends not to read the news. “For me, it is easier because it’s tax season. I don’t have time for news.” What does she tell her friends to do? “Visit family. Visit friends.”
I ask about her favorite things. Knitting, Insta looking, and As we talk, she characteristically holds back emotion. She’s learned to be flat. But when I mention a photo she took of “hair ice” her voice changes and exuberance flows.
“I saw it on the news, Instagram, everyone was talking about it. Then one Sunday, I went for a walk at Fragrance Lake. I had forgotten about it. And then I saw. ‘That’s it! That’s it!’” Hair ice looks like fine, silky hair creating delicate, angel-hair-like strands in mid-air. This ice phenomenon vividly contrasts beauty and the ice formed by a fungus. In the twinkling of an eye, workday fatigue and worry disappear as the rare and mysterious winter wonder reawakens that sensation of Whoa!
As you make your way through this time, protecting your children, loving whom you love, landing on a recipe that looks delish, I hope that you’re also making time to sing out a few favorite things.
Tell a friend about your moment of awe. Absorb awe’s cascade of benefits so that instead of just fear and deep sadness, feel good too. Anticipate tomorrow.
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Notes:
YouTube
https://gotcupofsugar.substack.com/p/noticing-a-third-way-for-america?r=6vskh
https://gotcupofsugar.substack.com/p/noticing-adjacent-sevens?r=6vskh
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/search?q=awe+studies
Vaclav Havel, The Power of the Powerless, With an introduction by Timothy Snyder, (Penguin Random House, 2018)