Searching for Serenity

These are the words you should have read last week, the words I should have written a couple of Fridays ago. I couldn’t type. I wasn’t able to see the screen of my iPad, what with all the tears streaming down my face. I cannot point to any one thing that made me cry for several hours that day and many others since. If you could see me now, I am doing a full-form, complete length of both arms, roundhouse gesture meaning All-of-This makes me cry.

I am doing the meditations, I am lighting the candles, and being in thoughtful gratitude for all I have right now: food every day, safe shelter, an iPad, internet, a working sewing machine, creative curiosity, love, and more. I even say thanks to the abundance all around us, that we have everything we need on this little blue marble. I start and end the day in gratitude. Maybe even in peace with a dash of hope. It is all the hours in between and in the middle of the night, that are becoming more of a challenge.

A friend of mine, who is not at all religious, is very close to getting the serenity prayer tattooed on their arm. In case I wasn’t sure what it was — my very atheistic upbringing and adulthood was in the forefront of their mind, I am sure — my friend repeated it for me. When I looked into it, I saw that the well-known version is not the original. But even more interesting is all the other philosophical nuggets along the lines of the serenity prayer. Like this one from Shantideva, an Indian Buddhist scholar:

If there’s a remedy when trouble strikes,
What reason is there for dejection?
And if there is no help for it,
What use is there being glum?

I immediately stopped being glum. Then I wondered if Shantideva said glum, and what is glum in Sanskrit?

Ah, but what is our remedy? Or, more to Monk Shantideva’s point: What is my remedy? I feel like it is all the same thing, really. My remedy is ours and yours is mine. That is also where “no help for it” comes in because:

No tweets, no laughs, no emails, or signs, it seems, could get us away from using the horrible “Red, Yellow, Green light” analogy to educate the state on where and how to operate during a pandemic. We have some of the highest rates of infection but we are still on Green. We are even preparing to reopen schools in the fall. How? Why? In what dimension? The remedy must be future tense, correct? Not the past? So what can we do now? Is there too much fear from commerce to take a step back? Will we continue to do the one week closed here and there, then another and another? A state-wide version of the clunky federal response?

Similarly, no cajoling, no laughter, no admonishing, no guilt or smugness can get someone to wear a mask who doesn’t want to wear one. My remedy is to wear one everywhere when I leave the house. Shantideva is telling me that I should not be glum that you are not wearing yours. I try, I really do.

But on my morning walks as I try to gather the joy I need for the day, when I see someone not wearing a mask, I feel it. Like a shadow that strikes my eyes through the tree canopy clouding the sun’s brilliant morning bath on my face. Wait, I think, what and why?

What advice do you have, dear Shantideva, to get us to understand that our shared remedy saves us, that we are each other’s keeper? Or is there No Help For It?