A Letter to My Daughter on Finding Joy While Surviving the Pandemic
Dear Elizabeth:
As I was shuttling you to your intensive dance class today, and as Kabul was falling, taking Afghanistan with it, and as your mother and I were tying to find a sane way to send you back to school in the midst of the pandemic, you said to me, “I love to dance, Dad, and I really love the jazz dancing, and that’s what we’re doing this afternoon. I am so psyched!”
The joy in your voice was palpable, and I could feel it. And it felt good.
After I dropped you at dance class, I delivered a loaf of bread I’d made for my teacher and friend, Geshe Dorjee. He was sitting on his front porch, doing his mantra recitation in the midst of his garden: birds, flowers, flowering vines, shrubs, hanging ferns, succulents . . . a place of pure joy. As you know, Geshe left Tibet in 1959, survived an attempted genocide, disease, hunger, and exile, finally becoming a Buddhist monk in south India, and landing here in Fayetteville, Arkansas where he teaches with me at the University.
You know all of this about Geshe, but it bears repeating now as you face these public-health problems that no school child—or anyone, for that matter—should have to face. Throughout his life, Geshe has consciously cultivated the resources he needed to cultivate joy wherever he found himself. It’s a useful skill to have. I’ve learned three things from him, and I thought I’d list them here so that you can have a look at them later in your life when the going gets tough. And when joy might not come as naturally to you as it comes now.
I’ve tried to find Western equivalents to his Tibetan practice because manufacturing joy isn’t a Buddhist or a Tibetan practice; it’s a human way of living productively and surviving hardship.
—First, maintain your ability to think intuitively. Most of the medical information that we are given now comes from a distinctive, successful, and necessary way of thinking and asking questions that arrive from the eighteenth century, and even has clear precedents two centuries earlier. Let’s call it empiricism. And let’s oppose it to intuition. We are all swamped now with empirical thinking from the medical community, and while it’s a life-saving skill-set, it moves us away from an equally vital, ancient, and intuitive way of thinking that also contributes directly to our overall wellness. Carl Jung, in his book, Symbols of Transformation, called this “fantasy thinking,” and he opposed it to “scholastic thinking.” But “fantasy” in English has the wrong connotations because it conjures up delusion and misperception. Jung also at times in the same book used the term “subjective thinking,” and that seems a better fit for my purposes.
Nonetheless, Jung saw fantasy thinking as vital to our mental health because it is a primary source of undiluted, human creativity and balance. It’s hard to write about this way of knowing because it resists language—the major tool of empiricism. Still, it’s easy to know when this joy is present. For example, I know that you love to visit the art museum in Bentonville, so I’d recommend that you make a regular practice, wherever you may be, of looking at the paintings that you love. Or look at a print of the same painting, and don’t think about why you love it. Just love it. Be quiet, don’t talk, and love the painting. (One such painting for me is Vermeer’s “View of Delft,” or most anything by Vermeer, for that matter. But you already know this because whenever I bring it up in that annoying parental way, you roll your eyes, and say, Yes, Dad, I now about that Vermeer guy.)
This is what I mean by responding intuitively. And it’s close to what Jung meant by fantasy thinking. When you do this, you’re replenishing your deeper human energies, particularly your emotional muscles, those that triumphantly refuse the shackles of language and reason and argument and all of the unpleasant engagements that often go along with language, particularly on social media. Looking at paintings is not always a seamless experience because paintings can activate repressed emotions that damage us; but as we look at the painting and bring those troublesome emotions out of the shadows, we find health. And experiences of this kind have been shown to boost our immune system in empirically traceable ways! (One good source for this information is Radical Remission, by Kelly A. Turner, in case you’re interested.)
— Second, clear your own path of joy. Using your experience with the painting as a template, you can also discover other similar experiences that bracket language, analysis, and the empirical way of thinking that comes with it. You should indulge yourself in these experiences without apology. Forge this path for yourself, do it as relentlessly as you can, and know that this is a vital element of a healthy life. And remember: even in the most difficult times, joy is available. Geshe doesn’t teach this; he does something more effective than teaching—he models joy every day, even as his people are suffering human-rights violations in Tibet at the hands of the Chinese.
I see Geshe working at this project every day. It is not always easy to clear this path, and during the hardest times, it will be impossible, but it can be done with perseverance and patience because we all have the capacity to do it. And yet much in contemporary culture insists that we ignore this life-giving capacity and confine ourselves to other seemingly more responsible ways of being: political engagement, ideological warfare, opinion-making. Do not listen to these voices. Keep at this joy-project on a daily basis, a little at a time, and it will become a revitalizing experience. Our immune systems will prosper as well.
— Third, schedule joy. This, of course, seems counter-intuitive. How do you schedule joy? How do you schedule that which resists scheduling? You can’t. But you can, as you already know, show up for dance class, even when you’re tired and sore. You can schedule the opportunity, the conditions, in which joy might arise, and you must do this because the other scheduling—get the groceries, resist tyranny—that we all confront is fierce and unyielding. But because you do need groceries and you should do all you can to resist tyranny, you’ll need to set aside every day three minutes, thirty minutes, three hours, or whatever you choose, to look at your version of the “View of Delft,” or to examine the shadows thrown by your hickory tree, or to listen closely to the rain, or to walk slowly down the street, paying attention to what the birds are telling you and not questioning their wisdom, and to do so without thinking. Without the need to justify. Without the compulsion to reason.
We can all discover ways to do this because it is an innately human talent. And as we do this, we are helping ourselves to a stronger life. We are getting stronger because we are walking the path of joy. Remember, the world around us is a world of embedded miracles that we have been taught to overlook. Particularly during a pandemic. But, as you are beginning to understand, there are tyrants in our lives, and we do need to buy groceries. So looking at pictures—a phrase that I’m sure you see now is a metaphor for your own catalogue of joy-projects—is an essential way to fight back, to reclaim the joy that is rightly yours, and to buy groceries and fight tyrants with an open, joyful heart.
I believe, Elizabeth, that joy is your birthright, an inheritance that your universe has configured and made available to you. You need only clear out the time in your life to claim it.
I wish you much more than luck in this project. I wish you endurance, foresight, and loving friends like Geshe Dorjee. With those three in your life, you’ll succeed.
I love you, Elizabeth. Long may you run.
