It’s been a while since I’ve posted. The truth is, this hasn’t been the easiest fall for me.
If I’m honest, this whole year hasn’t been the easiest year for me (has it been for anyone?). In addition to watching in horror as we spiral into an authoritarian dystopia, some major changes–moving to a new state and changing jobs–as well as some additional more personal challenges have brought me face-to-face with the precarious nature of our daily comforts, and even of our very lives. While I’m not turning 40 until next year, I feel that I have gone head-first into mid-life crisis mode (if you need material proof of this crisis, just check out the new bike in my garage).
I want to acknowledge my privilege, and fully recognize that I am far from the hardest hit by everything that 2025 has had to throw at humanity. After all, the changes that I’ve experienced have included a new job with increased salary and a new home purchase, so there have definitely been some wins. But all of the underlying stresses of everything have really come out into the open this fall, and they’ve all taken their toll on me, both physically and emotionally.
It all started in early September, when my whole household was laid low with covid. The illness was mild, and we all recovered within a week. A few weeks later, in early October, I came down with what felt like a run-of-the-mill daycare virus. It felt like a minor cold, so I went ahead with the bike tour to DC that I had been planning for months (the tour, by the way, was amazing–check out my highlights of the first, second, and third days). Unfortunately, after the tour I began to feel much worse. I was frequently exhausted, and started to feel additional symptoms–shortness of breath, chest tightness, and occasional dizziness–which triggered anxiety attacks that I was having some sort of cardiac emergency. The stress of preparing to move into a new house (we moved at the end of October), coupled with learning that my current job is not as secure as I had once thought, didn’t do much to help these symptoms. On top of all this, given the coughs and runny noses that Ian and Katie have had most of October, I’m pretty sure that my body was working through at least 1-2 additional follow-up viruses. In November, I’ve had stretches of time where I’ve felt almost fully healthy (if a little more fatigued than usual), but I’m still finding periods where extreme exhaustion, aches, and/or anxiety attacks become overwhelming. After a series of appointments with my GP, we’ve determined that the most likely explanation for all this is that lingering issues from 2 covid infections (I had also gotten it in February of this year) coupled with additional viral infections and stress have just ravaged my body. Yet lurking in the anxious part of my mind are fears that this isn’t the full picture, and that doctors are just going to write my symptoms off as stress when there’s something more serious. Ironically, if I knew that this was all stress-related, I wouldn’t feel as stressed.
Waiting for the Next Ambush
Regardless of what’s going on inside my body, I think it’s fairly likely that emotional stress has a role to play. I hate to attribute this illness to stress, since it engenders a perception that this is all “just in my head.” But it’s also true that the experiences I’ve had over the past year have habituated me to constantly clenching my muscles in a sort of low-level readiness, waiting for things to jump out at me. I have come face-to-face with the ways that I have been trying to avoid touching emotional pain all year (and further back than that, most likely). Over the years, I have developed a sophisticated mental defense system that is engineered to keep any sort of unpleasant feeling out of my awareness. Faced with some significant life changes, I’ve been relying heavily on this system to immerse myself in things that make me feel what I want to be “normal”: day-to-day routines of work and parenting, pet programming projects like learning Rust, and obsessing over all things bicycle. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I hit 2,000 miles of riding this year, and the last time I rode this much was in 2020. Cycling has definitely become a major coping mechanism for me.
While there isn’t anything inherently wrong with such activities–in fact, they’re all quite important parts of a balanced life–I’ve realized that these types of activities can also become shields against uncomfortable thoughts and feelings that need to be given space. I am a pro at burying myself in hobbies and activities, putting up a defense to avoid dealing with uncomfortable questions. What if this illness is serious? What if I continue to get worse? What if I get too sick to be able to bike again? What if I don’t learn the right skills to keep myself relevant as a programmer? Or worse, what if new technology transforms programming to something devoid of all the joy and creativity that it used to give me? What if I’m attacked and/or arrested during a peaceful protest? What if I lose access to any of those daily staples of my life, whether essential or mundane, that make me feel like I’m a “normal”, “successful” individual? I think it’s quite likely that some of the physical symptoms I’ve been feeling–muscle tightness in particular–reveals some subconscious effort to keep strong feelings of pain shoved under the rug.
The unfortunate truth is that such fears are keeping me from feeling joy as fully as I could. I've had multiple times through this illness where I've felt like I was improving, only to feel increased anxiety as symptoms build up and a sense of betrayal when I have to admit to myself, to my family, and my friends that, no, I thought this was me turning the corner, but I'm back to square one. In turn, over the past few weeks, every time I've felt better, I've been hesitant to say so. In the good times, I qualify how I’m feeling with a “for now,” or a “for the most part”, or a “knock on wood”. I have had moments of joy, especially seeing Ian grow into the amazing 4-year-old he is, but I'm always sort of bracing myself as I look around the corner for the next attack to come. This is a tendency that I’ve had most of my life, and has been heightened since the pandemic in 2020 and becoming a parent in 2021. I've constantly felt the need to qualify my happiness. When things go well for me, I try not to say it too loudly, as if voicing something happy would jinx things. There's frequently a voice in my head telling me that I shouldn't get my hopes up too much, or else it will hurt when I get disappointed.
Reconnecting with the Dharma
Buddhist teachings have become valuable resources for me in the midst of all of this fall’s difficulties. I've identified as Buddhist for about 15 years, but I've never really been what you would call a devout practitioner. I do 5-10-minute meditations when I have time (trying to carve out more regular time for this), I attend a weekly Sangha (Buddhist group) where I do a longer meditation, and I subscribe to Daily Dharma for articles and snippets of teachings in my inbox every morning. But it's become evident to me just how much I’ve co-opted these practices into routine in such a way that they’ve just become…well, chores. I sit on the cushion, but I'm either trying to make myself have a certain experience, or just zoning out and planning what I'm going to do when I stop. I go to weekly Sangha meetings, but I phone it in (literally, as I am still engaged in a Knoxville-based sangha where I attend sessions via Zoom). And I gloss over daily dharma readings, just trying to get to the end so I can move on to using my phone for some other diversion like sports scores or social media so I don't have to engage too hard with anything I don't like.
I think a lot of the reason for this attitude stems from a slightly misguided perception of the dharma (Buddhist teachings). I originally was drawn to Buddhism when the stress of graduate school guided me to the cushion. In readings from authors like Thich Nhat Hahn and Pema Chödrön I found wisdom that just resonated with me. When I read how these authors and other modern Western dharma teachers described the habitual patterns of ego-clinging that cause people to suffer, I felt like they could have been writing specifically with me in mind. When meditation helped me experience the relief that comes from letting down resistance to hard moments in life and simply accepting the present moment as it is, I saw a powerful tool that I could carry with me for the rest of my life.
At this time, I was in my 20s, and aside from the career uncertainty that faces every grad student in the humanities, things were going pretty well for me. I was healthy, happily married, funded in my program, had a good relationship with the members of my doctoral committee, and had no significant obligations to take care of any non-feline dependents. Of course I knew, intellectually, that things would not always be this easy. I would eventually finish my program and need to convince someone to give me a job, preferably one with an actual living wage. My body wouldn't allow me to drink and eat whatever I wanted and just brush it off the next day with an IbuProfen and a glass of water. I would need to face the uncertainties and stresses of parenthood, if my wife and I decided (as we have) to try for a child. Eventually, I would have to come to face my parents’ mortality–as well as my own–as we all advance in years. But since I had meditation and dharma, I thought, I'd be ok when life got tougher.
This attitude, well-intentioned as it is, has created misperceptions in my mind. At a certain level, I felt I could just sprinkle some meditation on my problems and magically be able to handle whatever life would throw at me. This, in turn, engendered unrealistic expectations, and disillusionment when the expectations were inevitably not met. When Buddhism is a tool to pick up only when things get tough, the mind is pre-disposed to turn practices into homework assignments that have to be completed. I sit on the cushion for a body scan, and the goal-achieving part of me deep down thinks, “alright. I am going to scan the shit out of this body. I'm going to be such an awesome body scanner! I can't wait to feel how great this body scan is going to make me feel!” Or, when I am anxious, I think, “alright, I'm feeling anxious. I'm just going to take care of this feeling with a meditation about anxiety, and then things won’t feel so bad anymore.”
Of course, treating pain and discomfort as things that need to be fixed only makes them stronger. I’m reminded of the story of the Tibetan monk Milarepa being assaulted by demons while meditating in his cave. When he found his cave filled with countless demons, he first sought to banish them all. This only made the demons grow stronger and more disruptive, so he attempted to teach them the dharma in an attempt to convince them of the errors of their ways. When that didn’t work, however, he changed course, telling the demons that they were welcome to stay as long as they wanted, and that he would accept whatever they had to teach him. All the demons then vanished, except for one particularly vicious-looking one. At that point, Milarepa climbed straight into the vicious demon's mouth, and told the demon that it may devour him if it wished. Only then did the final demon leave the cave and allow Milarepa peace.
This is a useful story about how resisting negative thoughts and emotions tend to only make them stronger–the old cliche that what we resist persists. I’m particularly struck by the experience with that last demon, the cruelest, nastiest looking one of the bunch. In that demon’s case, it wasn’t enough for Milarepa to just allow it to stay–he had to fully expose himself to being devoured. Here, I see a powerful lesson about how facing our demons requires a substantial leap of faith. When we truly acknowledge the fears and frustrations that are plaguing us–not just say we acknowledge them so that they’ll leave–we are stepping into the demon’s mouth, and leaving ourselves subject to being devoured. Paradoxically, it is this very exposure to the most menacing of our emotions that offers the path to becoming liberated from them.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reminded of the difference between banishing suffering and transforming it. Thich Nhat Hahn has presented Buddhism as a way to transform the fundamental truth of suffering into joy. Most of our lives, our actions are conditioned by years (and even lifetimes) of habitual patterns of attachment. When we find ourselves best by demons like Milarepa was, we label them as bad and seek to banish them. What I’m realizing (or, perhaps, re-realizing) is that those moments when I truly let down my defense against all of the fears, frustrations, and worries that plague me, there is a greater experience. It’s not necessarily a pleasant experience–quite the opposite, in many cases. But it allows me to touch on the core experience of being human. It opens me up to our interconnectedness, with the knowledge that suffering is a fundamental experience we all share. It reminds me that the challenges of life are not obstacles in my path, they are my path, and awareness of the true nature of things as they are is the doorway to the cessation of suffering for all sentient beings. The treasures of our shared humanity are always with us, at every moment, even the shitty ones (especially the shitty ones).
2025 sure has had plenty of such shitty moments. And in all likelihood 2026 will have its fair share too. But at these moments, I can allow myself to open up to how my suffering is connected to the suffering of all sentient beings on the planet. This doesn't magically take the pain away. But it isn’t supposed to–the pain is the path. Connecting to the suffering of all sentient beings allows me to also connect to their joy. If I keep avoiding the suffering, I keep myself from truly feeling joy. I keep myself from feeling human. It seems the path to joy leads straight into the demon’s mouth.