January 6, 2021: What I Want My Daughter to Know about the Siege on Our Capitol
Dear Elizabeth:
I began this essay the morning after the House managers concluded their case against our former President, Donald J. Trump, and just before the defense counsel for the President presents its case and the full Senate votes to acquit him of all wrong doing. No one will be surprised by this verdict.
As I watched the trial, you carried on your life as an eleven-year-old girl. You were obsessed with dance, did well in school during a pandemic (stationed at home in your virtual classroom), and you mastered every form of social media that allowed you to connect with your friends: you texted, you FaceTimed, you TikTok’d. You’re having some trouble with social studies, but there’s not much I’d call social about our lives now, so I understand your problem. The English language can be cruel at times, and I find “social studies” just now to be an unfortunate phrase.
After all, and as one of my friends recently observed, you have now spent 10% of your life in quarantine. For me, that would be close to seven years.
I can’t imagine what that means for you. Clearly, you understand in a way I didn’t at your age that life can pivot on a dime, that uncertainty is the only certainty, and that impermanence is one of the essential human conditions. You’ve been surrounded by Tibetan monks since you were born, and they’ve all applauded this special knowledge that you’ve acquired at such an early age.
In addition to the pandemic, you also watched with an eleven-year-old’s version of incredulity and confusion as our Capitol was surrounded by thousands of Trump supporters, many of whom ultimately breached and vandalized the building, saying and doing things that were brutal, embarrassing, and ignorant.
You asked me why this was happening, a reasonable question that I couldn’t answer. I don’t know what historians will say about the siege on our Capitol building, beyond the obvious: that our species is capable of making a great deal of trouble for a lot of innocent and reasonable people. I said something like that to you, and you seem satisfied with the answer.
But I wasn’t.
Because I didn’t really answer your question, I wanted to leave you with three observations that occurred to me over the past several weeks. I’m not doing this because I have something unique to say, or something that will instantly clarify these events, or provide the historical context for them.
I’m doing this because, even though I can’t really explain what happened, I can offer some advice about how you might react to what happened. My Tibetan teachers, over the years, have drawn my attention to the three points I’ll make, and I might as well say from the beginning that every responsible parent that I know has said the same thing to their children. You don’t have to be a monk to know these things, but it does seem that when you shave your head, put on maroon robes, and smell like incense, the children listen more closely to what you have to say.
–Understand that part of your self-identity arises from the company that you keep. Your friends have a powerful influence on how you think about yourself and ultimately how you judge yourself. At times, this influence is helpful, and at other times it is not. You must look out for yourself in these matters, monitor your ups and downs, and decide when it’s time to find new friends and seek out new communities. It’s a difficult task and one that never ends—I am still doing it on a regular basis and, being somewhat of a loner, I still have limited success with it.
A rule of thumb that you might want to keep in mind: when your community, the one that currently engages your time and energy, begins to cause trouble for other communities—I’m not thinking here of John Lewis’s “good trouble”—you should have a look at your current involvement with that community. The individuals that entered the Capitol building on January 6 belonged to a community whose shared goal was based partly on violence and ended in the loss of human life. The psychological adjustments that each member of that group must now make as they go about their daily lives will deform them in ways that will have a decisive impact both on them and on their communities as well. We’re all part of that larger community, and we’re all affected by what they did. Individuals, it turns out, bear some of the responsibility for the actions undertaken by the communities they claim as theirs.
–Recognize the difference between solitude and loneliness. Partly because I’m an only child and partly because my pantheon of heroes has always included those odd folks who decide to wander into the Himalayan mountains and sit in caves for decades at a time—I cut out a picture of an Indian yogi from a National Geographic when I was about your age and kept it close to hand for years—I have always been comfortable alone, even though I haven’t experienced a great deal of loneliness. Which is how I define solitude: being alone without being lonely. I don’t know how your generation will define solitude or if you will value it. But the conviction grew slowly within me that the time I spent alone, aware of the fact that I was alone, and not just watching TV alone or reading a book alone, but being alone, taught me lessons that I couldn’t have learned in other ways.
I won’t say much about those lessons except that they have been unique, durable, and responsive to the changing circumstances of my life. Loneliness is different. Loneliness, if unchecked, can cause us to seek out communities to ease the pain of our loneliness. If those communities are bent on doing harm to others, and if they accept us and, for the moment, ease our pain, then we might find a way to justify the harm we are doing to others as we alleviate our loneliness. I suspect that many of those who broke into the Capitol building on January 6 carried with them a desperate loneliness that for a violent moment the group assuaged.
–Trust the knowledge you get from solitude; look askance on the ideas that pop up when you are lonely. Solitude at first can be daunting. But after you’ve entertained and rejected all the reasons for abandoning it—It’s selfish! It’s pointless! It’s helping no one!—a stable peace will appear within you, and if you don’t indict it as being selfish and pointless and useless, this peace will hang around awhile. And the longer it remains, of course, the better because you’ll eventually come to see yourself as a peaceful person, even as the Capitol is being invaded by a group of violent and hysterical members of your own species. That’s a big deal because you’re beginning to understand your options. You’re learning that as a community, we’re capable of great acts of violence and sustained bouts of peace. Solitude gives each of us the opportunity to choose between them while recognizing our shared responsibility for both of them.
Don’t take my word for it. Solitude is a big and formative experience for a lot folks that I’ve spent a lot of time with: Buddha, Christ, William Blake, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Henry David Thoreau, John Cage, Brian Eno, Virginia Woolf, Montaigne, Mary Oliver, Thomas Merton, the Dalai Lama, Pema Chödrön, Tenzin Palmo, E.B. White. All of them, each in his or her unique way, taught me a lot about solitude.
As I understand the term, then, solitude can clear out the space you need to develop productive ways of living in the face of this violence. In The Art of Solitude, Stephen Batchelor—another writer I’d add to my list—is very clear about the whole business of solitude, and I’ll use his words as my conclusion:
There is more to solitude than just being alone. True solitude is a way of being that needs to be cultivated. You cannot switch it on or off at will. Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it. When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul (xi).
Take care of your soul, Elizabeth, even when it might appear to you that no one else is taking care of theirs. If you do that—and here’s the final teaching from the monks—you’re taking care of everyone else too.
