The Spirit of Simplicity in Uncertain Times
On Inauguration Eve, a personal post about the importance of ritual and focus during times of political uncertainty.
I believe it was Terry Eagleton, that melodious philosopher-slash-theologian of British wit, who first introduced me to the idea that human beings crave ritual and that the general demise of spiritual rituals created a contested void that still calls out to be filled.
On the eve of one of our more established political rituals, the inauguration of the President of the United States, I am engaging in a holy ritual of my own making: my Sunday evening apartment cleaning. Every Sunday evening I pause all other work to honor the secular sacraments of taking out the trash, mopping and vacuuming the floors, Windexing everything made of glass and 409’ing everything made of porcelain, replacing books to their proper place on the shelves, changing the sheets, dusting every flat surface, and preparing food for the week. In the past year since I first decreed it so, it has become among the most guarded hours of my week.
Amid a disorderly world, ritual provides the perception, however temporary or illusory, that we can set some part of the world aright or set ourselves right with the world--even if it is only at the scale of a small living space. It is perhaps for this reason, rather than despite it, that so many of our most inspirational writers and thinkers, from Thomas Merton to Emily Dickinson to Immanuel Kant, lived lives of renowned simplicity and structure as if there was a connection between making sense of the world and making sense of one’s cupboard.
On the eve of this second inauguration of Donald Trump (one that is not even guaranteed to be his last), my ritualistic chores inspired a different kind of ordering, an ordering of misplaced expectations that the psychoanalysis Adam Phillips explores in his book Missing Out. In his characteristically enigmatic and (to me, delightfully) circular style, Phillips argues that our lives are defined, in part, by the lives we did not live. We could have married this person or that, we could have been a [insert your aspirational professional title], we could have been someone else. Phillips is getting at the distinct form of psycho-emotional loss that comes not from losing a thing we desired, but from never having a thing we desired in the first place. How we grieve the loss of the life we never had is part of the answer to how we live a good and fulfilling life.
In a related but different vein, Judith Schalansky’s An Inventory of Losses explores how we might accept loss without imposing artificial value either on what is lost or what remains since both are ways of smuggling in ethical and political values that often go unrecognized and unassessed themselves. In a brutal yet poignant passage, Schalansky states simply: “In the end, all that remains is simply whatever is left.”
However different they may seem, I believe there is a thread that ties together Phillips and Schalansky. Despite Schalansky’s brutalism and Phillip’s speculation, they are both navigating the question of what we do with the lives we have when we know, through our apparently uniquely human form of self-reflective reasoning, that we could have been so much more and we could have also been nothing at all.
We could be living in much better times; we could have been born into worse times. And the question I keep asking myself tonight, and the question I ask you: was the world ever any different than this? Is this political regressiveness and disorder, is this what we have always created, we human beings, we zoon politikon?
We lost so many years to foreign wars, years to a global pandemic, and years to the chaos of alternating presidential administrations. I realize that many people do not consider the Trump administration to be a loss; that for many people, possibly a majority of the country, it was the Biden administration that was the loss. Either way, it is tempting to wonder who we could have been as a society or as individuals if we did not have to endure this political chaos.
Like so many people whose professional or personal lives are intertwined with immigration, we wonder what we could have been if we didn’t have to confront the volatility, hypocrisy, and cruelty of the coming deluge of immigration policies. I know this for a fact. I have talked to so many colleagues and friends who, already exhausted by the policies of the Obama, Trump I, and Biden administrations, are cutting their losses to find a more emotionally sustainable way of making a living. A lot of people have used the term PTSD with me, and not in a sarcastic or hyperbolic tone. I have also talked to many people who have no choice: they have no choice but to resist because it affects them or affects someone very close to them. And some, like myself, simply refuse to cede territory to the tide of misinformation and xenophobia that is dividing our country.
But how do we survive this tension between the lives we have, including the flood of up to 100 executive orders promised to be signed tomorrow, and the less volatile lives we might wish we could be living right now? How do we navigate the all-to-real existential questions that the Trump administration will prompt for millions of people in this country whose lives will be upended by policies we know are coming and many that we cannot yet imagine? How do we remain politically engaged without getting overwhelmed?
As I posted on Substack notes the other day, I believe the key is to stay focused and one way to stay focused is to pick a lane, know our limits, and make time for balance in our everyday lives.
Another way to say this, returning to Eagleton’s point above, is to create your own rituals that allow you to mark time, regain some sense of stability and control, and introduce joy and connection into your life. There is much you cannot control. The next 24 hours, the next seven days, will likely be reminiscent of the chaotic first week of the first Trump administration. And the distraction machine of social media, including the chaos surrounding TikTok right now, is all too eager to make money off of your anxiety. We must be clear-headed. We must create boundaries. We might even learn at this moment how to find a semblance of peace in the soil of simplicity despite the uncertainty that surrounds us.
The Trappist monk Thomas Merton, whom I mentioned above, entered the monastery just days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, even as many of his generation were signing up to fight in the coming World War. It would be easy to see Merton as a coward. But Merton later became one of the most prolific and influential pacifist writers of the 20th century, shaping how generations of people of faith and of no faith at all thought about war. One lesson we could take from Merton in our present moment is that the best action we can take is to tune out the anxiety-inducing noise (shoved into our brains today by the news) and curate our lives in ways that allow us to think soberly and compassionately about our world.
Tomorrow I will provide a curated analysis of immigration-related news and policies from Day 1 of the Trump administration, updated every hour on the hour from 10:00 am to the end of the day, complete with links to important source material. If you follow along, I invite you to comment with your perspective or updates. If you want to get an alert about that post, be sure to subscribe.
And if you save the post, you’ll be able to come back later for a helpful archive of resources. I hope that this newsletter, and tomorrow’s post in particular, will be a way for you to focus on what matters without having to stay glued to half-a-dozen social media platforms and navigate various disreputable sources.
Tonight, however, I submit dutifully to my Sunday evening ritual. Over the next four years, we are responsible for staying informed and taking action where we can. But we also have to do the dishes. No matter how we might lament the lives we wish we could be living right now, we cannot forget to care for the lives we have left.
The sun will one day cease to burn—but not tomorrow.
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Immigration is the only thing I want to remain informed about. I can't take it all. As a social worker I will have to stay informed at some level. But just the facts. Immigration, however, I do want to know. Because it, out of perhaps everything, is where both Ds and Rs are absolutely abysmal and where the average citizen has (without much apparent trouble) bought into absolute fallacy. It frustrates and sickens me beyond measure. I am thankful to you and a couple of immigration attorneys I follow for your insight and instruction.
The world is an interesting place. For me, not having grown up here, it felt like it was a mix of regressivism and stagnation, maybe a glimmer of progress and returning back to regress where I grew up in. I have learned that it's a non linear process and people can swing either way based on their perceptions of fear, nostalgia, simplicity, stability and hope. I am definitely oversimplifying it for sure.