Here for the Suffering

Learning how to live full in the catastrophe. Peaceful John. New tunes. And Pema, always Pema.

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I had several conversations this week about the upcoming election and the stress it's causing people. No one is drinking over it or even collapsing into total despair, but there is an edge in their voices that indicates that they truly believe something is coming for them. I try not to sit in those conversations for too long, but it's almost inescapable with less than a month to go. I keep reminding myself that when there are moments like this, when the air is thick and heavy with dread, the only way forward is to embrace the dread pretty much. 

Back in 2020, in the first few weeks of the pandemic, I bought Jon Kabat-Zinn's book Full Catastrophe Living but didn't open it because it was easier to pretend there wasn't a catastrophe. We had two toddlers and a newborn who hadn't experienced much of the outside world yet—and we hadn't fully grown out of the nesting phase—so I didn’t feel very trapped unless I stayed on my phone too long. Instead, we watched a million "Steve and Maggie" videos and ate a bunch of donuts. 

But there was a moment early on before Zoom 12-step meetings had fully taken off when I felt disconnected from the spiritual grounding of frequent in-person meetings. Someone made me feel better, though, at that moment—Peaceful John. He was, as usual, finding a way to settle into the new reality, even a bleak one. 

"This is the first in my lifetime where the whole world is suffering together over the same thing. It's quite beautiful if you think about it,” he said.

I took that with me into the week and finally read some of "Full Catastrophe Living," a very dense, 600-page activity book about meditation. The first chapter is called "You Have Only Moments to Live" and has a nice little quote at the beginning from Nadine Stair’s poem “Moments.”

"Oh, I've had my moments, and if I had to do it all over again, I'd have more of them. In fact, I'd try to have nothing else. Just moments, one after another, instead of living many years ahead of each day." 

I was also reminded of this old 2019 Clancy Martin story, "How to Suffer Better," which inspired our first and only foolhardy billboard campaigns. 

Here's the story. After the jump, you can read the rest of it and the weekly recovery rundown.

HOW TO SUFFER BETTER

by Clancy Martin

I would prefer to believe that my alcoholism caused my second divorce. I had been more than a year sober when I started having the affair that ended my second marriage. Anyone who has been sober for a while will tell you not to make major changes in your relationships in the first few years of sobriety, and that’s good advice. But the same person will also tell you that a lot of relationships end when one or both people quit drinking. The nasty truth is, I would never have married my second wife if I hadn’t been drunk all the time, and after a year of sobriety (she kept on drinking at first and then got sober several years later), we both realized that we hadn’t enjoyed each other’s company in a long time.

I remember one afternoon around this time, at a Starbucks in New York, my second wife and I were having a fight over the phone—she was back in Kansas City—and when I got off the phone, an attractive woman with a heavy Swedish or Danish accent leaned over and asked me: “Are you alright? Would you like to talk about it?” I told her, “I’m great, thank you.” I was sad and angry, but I was also enormously relieved. I walked up a side street in New York, on the Lower East Side, and shouted as loudly as possible: “I’m free! I’m free!”

I was not free. That was eight years ago, and just a few weeks ago, I was arguing with my ex-wife over the phone—this time, about our thirteen-year-old and a problem she was having with school. I don’t know how many times I have counted out the years until my daughters graduate from high school and start college, with the thought that, at last, their mother and I will have a little more distance and liberty. She must feel the same way.