When There's Nothing You Can Do About It
Abandoning hope for escape from life's blizzards.
I’ve practiced mindfulness daily since October 2002 and sporadically for many more years, but I’m not trying to become enlightened. Meditation helps me to be more mindful when I’m not meditating.1
I’ve learned many surprising ways to cultivate attention at annual silent meditation retreats. The word retreat is misleading, though. Boot camp would be more fitting. The point isn’t to escape day-to-day life but to return to it equipped with skills for relating to it more effectively.
I’m not Buddhist or vegetarian. I’m your average monogamous, gay, Midwestern grandfather trying to live aligned with his values.2 I’m convinced attentional fitness is as necessary as physical fitness, and I'm doing what I can to demystify it so more people will consider finding exercises that fit their interests and needs.
It’s hard to convince people that there’s more to mindfulness than taking breaks to feel yourself breathing and chill. If noticing my breath every day to get better at relaxing was the whole game, I would have abandoned it twenty years ago.
If that’s not about being calm on demand and it’s not about trying to achieve permanent spiritual nirvana, then what is the point?
I’ve noticed a talent for making my life feel more difficult from the inside. It’s easy to go on autopilot, resist physical and emotional discomfort, and choke the life out of pleasant moments. At crucial times in my life, I found myself waiting for the world to accommodate my needs and feelings, which has repeatedly led to loneliness, bitterness, and despair. Waiting for the world to change leaves me feeling estranged from my life.
Developing new ways to relate to my ordinary senses, thoughts, feelings, and the people around me is often challenging and messy—not unlike the effort required to stay physically healthy—but the work I’m willing to do leads to feeling more at home in my life, regardless of the many factors beyond my direct control.
The premise of the movie Groundhog Day illustrates this in a down-to-earth way.
There’s a great scene when Billy Murray’s Phil frightens Andie MacDowell’s Rita when he tries to describe his suffering to her.
He’s been stuck for what seems like an eternity in a place he doesn’t want to be. In addition to the blizzard blocking the roads out of town, he’s caught in a time loop that he’s tried countless ways to escape. The relief he years for taunts him every morning when he wakes up at the same time, hearing the same annoying song and facing the same life-draining monotony of the ordinary day he’s trapped inside.
The audience is on Phil’s side at this point in the story. Is there anyone who hasn’t felt something like this at some point?
He has tried everything he could think of to end his suffering, but the misery of his waking nightmare continues. To everyone else, it's just an ordinary day, which intensifies his feelings of isolation. It's as if the entire community is conspiring to escalate his torment.
In the scene, Phil has lost hope in escape and tries to describe his plight to Annie by sharing intimate details about strangers in the diner.
At first, she’s convinced it’s just a stunt and dares him to tell her something personal he knows about her.
PHIL: You like boats, but not the ocean. You go to a lake in the summer with your family up in the mountains. There’s a long wooden dock and a boathouse with boards missing from the roof, and a place you used to crawl underneath to be alone. You’re kind to strangers and children, and when you stand in the snow you look like an angel.
RITA: How are you doing this?
PHIL: I told you. I wake up every day, right here, right in Punxsutawney, and it’s always February 2nd, and there’s nothing I can do about it.
When Phil finally calls off the fight against his situation, he starts focusing on the aspects of his experience that are within his control.
His circumstances don't change. The weather doesn't change. The people he interacts with don't change. The only thing that changes is how he relates to his life, moment by moment.
What's the result of accepting snowbound Punxsutawney as his home? He learns to play the piano and speak French. He helps people based on what he's learned about their personal struggles.
He allows his struggle to make him feel more alive.
It requires courage to take a counter-instinctual step into our personal blizzards instead of holding out for an escape.
We usually exhaust our escape strategies before we're willing to greet confusion and discomfort with hospitality. This isn't about passively forcing ourselves to accept painful or unjust situations. We still need to take action when and where we can.
But what about when there's nothing you can do about it? What can you do then?
Mindful awareness helps us pay closer attention to the habitual ways we relate to our thoughts and feelings. This kind of self-awareness gradually diminishes internal friction, which we often don't notice until it begins to dissipate. Learning to take life’s inevitable difficulties less personally leads to a kind of well-being that doesn’t require ideal circumstances.
If we wake up to find ourselves living a miserable story without a clear way out, the attentional skills strengthened by mindfulness practice can help us avoid making things worse. It can seem like a significant leap to trust that habitually paying attention to sensory perceptions can transform how we relate to the mundane, looping frustrations in our lives.
I’m encouraged by what I’ve come to observe in my own life and described by poets like William Butler Yeats, who claimed,
“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper."
When we devote less energy to insisting on an exemption from the chaos we must learn to navigate, we may discover a hidden source of kindness toward ourselves and others—some empathy for the inevitable challenges of being alive.
As Ellen Langer put it back in 2017, “Some people meditate to become more mindful. Meditation is really just a tool that leads to post-meditative mindfulness. Although it’s a good tool, it’s a tool nonetheless, not the end. There are other ways to work toward mindfulness. One is to simply notice new things.”
“Practicing mindfulness has changed my life, but I try not to make a big deal about it, and I’m not a fan of how mindfulness is usually marketed.”