The War's Over!

In which a change is gonna come.

Brookside Gardens, Mother’s Day 2024

This Morning I Pray For My Enemies

And whom do I call my enemy?
An enemy must be worthy of engagement.
I turn in the direction of the sun and keep walking.
It’s the heart that asks the question, not my furious mind.
The heart is the smaller cousin of the sun.
It sees and knows everything.
It hears the gnashing even as it hears the blessing.
The door to the mind should only open from the heart.
An enemy who gets in, risks the danger of becoming a friend.

— Joy Harjo

There is a scene that has been playing in my head lately. It is from one of my favorite movies - The Frisco Kid. (The movie is from 1979, and while has not aged perfectly, it ages well enough.)

It is the moment that Gene Wilder says, “The war’s over! Do you understand that? No more killing!” that keeps repeating on a loop in my mind. It is the desperation in his voice, and the exhaustion, and the regret.

Anyone who knows me at all knows that I have a sharp and thorny side. Heck, even those of you who do not know me, if you have read my writing here, you have an idea. A huge part of the problem is that I have always had what I call an overdeveloped sense of justice. If I am right and someone else is wrong - especially if the wrong is a harm-causing wrong, and especially especially if the harm-causing wrong is hurting someone I care about - I will go to some pretty harsh lengths to prove their wrongness, because it is not just enough to be right, the other person has to know how they are wrong, and understand it, and fix it, and own it.

There are, of course, times when this instinct is a necessary one. If I had fought any less fiercely for Ash over the past years, I cannot imagine the awful place she would be in right now (both literally and figuratively). There are times when backing away from a fight is no different than capitulation, and when the stakes are too high to ignore. I know this and I do not have regrets on that front.

But a funny thing happens when one or two or three all-consuming fights take over your life. To a hammer, everything is a nail, as the saying goes, and it is a particularly apt analogy here. It starts with fighting for my daughter on multiple fronts. Smash! And then my boss pushes me to make decisions that violate all of my professional ethics. Smash! But then the architect drawing the plans for my home addition messes them up (multiple times), and the problems cost me time and money I do not have. So…Smash! Then I try to get a computer problem solved and everyone I talk to in customer service just gives me the runaround, and…Smash! And then a friend does something that rubs me the wrong way, or says the wrong thing at the wrong moment…Smash!

And then, after a while, I find myself surrounded by rubble, my shoulders granite-hard with tension, and feeling the constant dread that accompanies the subconscious awareness that another if another fight has not just happened, it is probably right around the corner.

Oh, and have I mentioned the hormonal armageddon I have been experiencing for the past six or seven years, as menopause has crept menacingly closer? Or the PTSD diagnosis that I am only now willing to acknowledge and treat? (All credit here to my extraordinary therapist, who impelled me gently towards an intensive trauma-based therapy program, which I will start soon.) Or the thousand-and-one stressors that even a very privileged white single mom faces every day?

Right. So, put that all together and…[insert catastrophic Smash here].

I just started watching the compelling miniseries Beef, and I’ll be honest: it is hitting just a wee bit close to home. No spoilers for those who still have not watched it (you should), but I can say that that feeling of a small thing spiraling into inchoate, unstoppable rage is so familiar that it makes my heart pound just to watch it on the screen. (I think it will ultimately be cathartic, but even so, it is absolutely doing a number on my blood pressure.)

And of course, the internet. Online, our reaction times speed up and then the internet with its elephant memory pulls us into an endless outrage spiral, and we cannot escape. Online, the litigator in me suits up, and the mediator in me shuts down, drawn into a milieu that never welcomes nuance or compromise. '

In her spectacular book, Living Beautifully, Pema Chödrön writes:

In My Stroke of Insight, the brain scientist Jill Bolte Taylor’s book about her recovery from a massive stroke, she explains the physiological mechanism behind emotion: an emotion like anger that’s an automatic response lasts just ninety seconds from the moment it’s triggered until it runs its course. One and a half minutes, that’s all. When it lasts any longer, which it usually does, it’s because we’ve chosen to rekindle it.

Online, of course, we stay in the 90 second loop, because that is where the internet feeds. Online, it is one-stop outrage shopping, a literal Target, a Mega Mart of triggers. No one dives into the Google abyss to calm down, and we are always diving, aren’t we? And so 90 seconds becomes 180 becomes 270 becomes 360 becomes 450 becomes an hour becomes an afternoon becomes a day becomes a way of being.

When I worked at Center for Inspired Teaching, we frequently had facilitation and improv staff workshops, to hone our craft. An essential part of those workshops involved giving and receiving feedback, and so over the years I received a lot of feedback. And the number one piece of feedback I received was that whenever I was tired or deep in thought, my face defaulted to an angry expression. Not exactly Resting Bitch Face, but close - something akin to Thinking Bitch Face. That I wear my feelings on my face is not new information - I’m the kid whose parents got called to a meeting with the principal because I made a teacher cry just by glaring at her - but the extent to which I am telegraphing unhappiness is not something I feel good about.*

I don’t know why, but this is the photo I remember when I think about the way I look to others when I’m concentrating or tired. The late, great Tux, on the other hand, has Resting Cat Face.

Somehow along the way though, I think my RTF started to take over, to the point that I worry that I cannot just explain to people, “I just look angry; I’m really just [thinking, tired, etc.].” I worry that now I actually am angry much of the time, and that radiates outward, to my children, to my loved ones, and to all the random acquaintances, colleagues, and strangers I encounter every day.

Roald Dahl, in his marvelous and under-appreciated book, The Twits, wrote the following:

If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until it gets so ugly you can hardly bear to look at it.

A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.

I think about that quote a lot, whenever I become aware of how my mood reflects on my face, and I try to notice too all the people out in the world who have goodness shining from their lovely faces. I don’t want to become thought-ugly. I fear I already have.

So where does that leave me? Last week, after an unexpectedly unpleasant run-in with my neighbors (who thankfully just moved away), I decided I would stop fighting. About everything. And I think I stuck to that resolution for at least one whole hour, before getting sucked back into a new kerfuffle. Because it is not that easy, is it? I cannot just choose to put down the traumas of the past years, hit the kill switch on my always-activated fight-or-flight reflex, and achieve the peace of the Buddha, simply because I have good intentions. But I can do the work. I can try to slow down, use therapy to learn some new coping mechanisms, tend to the wounds I have been letting fester, and take steps into a different future. Along the way, I can also try to fill the gaps where the anger has been with all the best things: joyful moments with my family and Ben, building friendships, watching the raucous community of birds and squirrels who gather at the feeders just outside my windows, tending my growing flower garden, taking time offline, and all of the many things that help my shoulders unclench.

It is extra hard to do these things, of course, in 2024. I do not need to tell you that the world is sick. COVID has nothing on the rage pandemic, even if the body count is lower. Shouting is the new talking. Diatribe is the new dialogue. And I am tired. But I am also determined. It may take a while. I may have setbacks and relapses. But I am going to doggedly face a new direction, and hope for the best.

“The war’s over! Do you understand that? No more killing!”

This is what it looks like to radiate happiness. Except Elise. She is radiating confusion.

*In my defense she was a terrible teacher and I was protesting her unwillingness/inability to teach English class well.