Today is an emotionally difficult day. Let me explain. My son is going off to college out of state, and he is going a week early because he runs cross country for the school he’s attending. This means the campus looks as desolate as a scene from The Walking Dead, and I am moving him into a brick building that is as foreign to all of us as if it were built on Mars. As we unpack his bags we meet his roommate (thank God! Another living soul). A cross country running, similarly bright-eyed (or maybe it was more ‘deer-in-the-headlights’) freshman with his parents, his crap already in the room.
As we unloaded my son’s stuff and set it up in his dorm room, emotions vacillated in me by the minute like the show wheel of fortune. “What it’s gonna’ be this minute, folks? Sadness? Anxiety? Pride? Excitement?” I was becoming more and more aware that my son would not be driving home with us. I also could not help but feel the pull of his own anxiety and feelings of uncertainty of whether he could accomplish the task of staying and thriving at his school.
As I hauled his fridge up three flights of steps, I could feel my wheel of emotions causing me to feel grumpy. It’s normal to get fatigued by a whirlwind of emotions in a short period of time. Now, of course, I realize this on an intellectual level, but it doesn’t stop me from resisting: trying to stop, ignore, or change the uncomfortable emotions\’ onslaught that keeps persisting inside me. I feel my false bravado come up (‘I’m fine!’), then maybe that critical gremlin perks up inside my brain full of unhelpful self-talk (‘Oh, he’ll be fine, get over it!’). There’s tension between everyone, because uncertainty creates a cascade of emotions. Whether they are stressful or not, emotions can overwhelm and override our thought processes and dictate our actions.
I call up my mental-emotional tools. Try show myself and my family some loving kindness (maitri), acknowledging it is normal for me to feel sad, anxious, excited, all of it at the same time, about this huge change that is taking place in all of our lives. It’s ok for all of us to be uncomfortable with the unknown and uncertainty of this change and what it will bring. It is also absolutely normal for our son to be anxious and to worry about the uncomfortable emotions and moments he will have as he goes forward into this time of growth and stretching.
We are all feeling the need for some relief from this emotional stretching moment. I think back to something I spoke of with my son weeks ago before we even got in the car: “Although you may feel like difficult emotions are all there are in some moments, it is not so. There are joyful moments in these times as well that are so sweet – joyful moments that are rich with vibrant memories, moments that easily rival the heightened anxiety we feel. If we stay present and acknowledge some of these joyful moments as they occur, we feel the balance of all our situations, which is where equanimity resides, true joy itself.\” Carrying a box of trash down from the newly moved into dorm room, I began thinking of watching all my son with his teammates at cross-country barbeque, and that feeling of happiness I had at the time re-emerged in me.
Why do these joyful moments many times take a back seat to their anxiety-filled counterparts? Why can’t we as parents feel our pride or enthusiasm about our child’s up coming school year as strongly as our anxiety and fear? It is not the work of a villainous gremlin in our brain trying to sabotage our happiness, or the fact that difficult emotions are just ‘weightier’ and therefore more acknowledged. In reality, it is because our brains are hard-wired for survival, to keep us alive, and because of this, every situation that is deemed a threat to us (even if it’s only a threat to our egos) is given the brain’s resources effortlessly (mainly so we don’t do something that is going to cause us to lose a limb!).
So the bad news first – without mental-emotional training, your brain will let fear and anxiety rob you of the well-earned, wonderful moments in your life. It will take deliberate effort, training, and self-awareness to embed the kind of memories that feed our brains with joy (which could also be considered survival if you consider all the buckets full of cortisol pumping through our brains over time).
Now the good news! You don’t have to be Spock, know the Vulcan mind meld, or carry Yoda on your back for a millennium to see results from putting forth an effort to remain mindful of your joyful moments so the become embedded in your brain. When you start training your mind, you will quickly see an effect. That’s because these joyful emotions are just as available during difficult times as are our uncomfortable emotions. Every moment has them both available. These joyful moments are vibrant and real. They are as full of sights, sounds, smells, textures, and tastes as any memory that has been recorded in your mind. And you don’t have to ignore, push aside, or bob and weave yourself away from the more difficult emotions. Practicing mindfulness, means acknowledging all the moments in your life with equal weight, not just the ones that fill us with fear or anxiety.
When we finally left campus and proceeded to drive 12 hours home, we were sad and anxious one moment about how our son would fair in dorm life, then the next moment we were talking about how he seemed so happy with his new teammates. If we were grumpy with one another because we were tired, we were then happy to stop and see Niagara Falls. The only comfort helping us all along our long drive was one very simple but irrefutable truth: change is impartial.
What is momentarily foreign and threatening will soon become familiar…until the next change. As we drove back, our emotions could not escape this irrefutable truth as well. Uncomfortable emotions live side by side with our most joyful ones. Mindfulness can help you understand and govern your emotions as they change. When we know this, practice staying in the middle, and taking it all in, we have a much easier time owning all that has happened in our lives, instead of being held emotionally hostage by our fear of the next unknown.
