Disappointment: Four Buddhist insights

When life - and election results - don't deliver what we want

Photo by Al Soot on Unsplash

This is not a political newsletter and never will be. But I know from the messages I receive that many readers, whether living in USA or outside, are disappointed by the election results this week. ‘Disappointment’ may be too mild a description. Alarm, distress, anxiety and even shame are feelings I’ve heard vividly expressed in the past few days.

All these emotions are part of what makes us human. And Buddhism has useful tools to help us deal with them. If you are a regular reader, there’s nothing I’m about to say that you won’t have heard me say before.

But in times of heightened emotions it can sometimes be helpful to accept an extended hand that draws us back to a place of peace. To be calmly reminded of the true source of reality when others around us are losing their heads.

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Agency: we produce our own reality

Where does disappointment exist: outside us or in our minds? Clearly, it is a psychological thing. We don’t accidentally inhale clouds of disappointment walking down the street. It’s in here, not out there.

Disappointment – for which you may also read ‘distress,’ ‘anxiety,’ or ‘shame’ - is not an automatic and inevitable response to an external event. As election night viewers well know. It is the result of our beliefs and interpretations about an external event. Something happens. We have thoughts about it. Our thoughts lead to feelings of disappointment. That’s the sequence.

The thoughts that lead to disappointment are our own - ours to manage. No one can force them upon us. We may not be able to change reality, but the way we experience it is entirely up to us. Viktor Frankl, the Auschwitz survivor and pioneering psychologist, pointed out that even in the most dire circumstances, when it seemed inevitable that he and his fellow death-camp inmates would be worked to death, they had a variety of different attitudes. Our attitude is our choice.

This is a helpful starting point because a lot of the ideas that underpin despair have to do with helplessness: there’s nothing I can do! There’s too many of them and too few of us. They have the power and we don’t.

So, how about flipping things? How about taking ownership of our feelings where they exist – in our minds.

We are the monarchs of our minds. What’s going on in the world around us doesn’t inevitably force us to think or feel anything. Our subjective reality is entirely up to us. Far from there being nothing we can do, we are the only ones who can do anything, because we’re running our personal reality show. We’re the producers. We have agency. We are in control.

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Equanimity: let’s not imagine that we know what we don’t

Disappointment often has a future leaning. We’re disappointed because we hoped that X, Y or Z would happen in the future, but now it will be A, B or C. We wanted this, but that will happen instead.

This moment, here and now, is often unaffected. Our hours, days or weeks are much the same as they were before we got the news. We still do the same things, live the same life. But because of particular news we see the future more darkly.

Who among us is clairvoyant? Which of us has any idea what’s going to happen next week, let alone next year? Circling back to Viktor Frankl, would it not have been a reasonable assumption, when arriving at Auschwitz, that he would die there like just about everyone else?

To ‘assume,’ I was once told, makes an ‘ass’ out of ‘u’ and ‘me.’ We simply have no idea what the future holds. To interpret a particular piece of news as if we know the future is irrational – not that that stops many of those around us from opining on just that. Often those with the loudest voices.

I have quoted the following folk tale before, and I’m quoting it here again because it is so instructive on the benefits of practicing equanimity:

An old man loses his horse to the wild. Horses are a measure of wealth and when his fellow villagers come around wailing and commiserating, he just says stoically, ‘We’ll see.’

Days later his horse returns - along with a few wild horse friends he picked up along the way. The man is now richer by several horses! The villagers come round delighted for him – if somewhat envious. He just says, ‘We’ll see.’

Attempting to ride one of the wild horses, his son is thrown off and breaks his leg. It is harvest time and everyone is needed to help in the fields. The villagers wring their hands, despondently. ‘We’ll see,’ the old man tells them.

The imperial army comes around recruiting able-bodied young men. Unlike other young men, his son is exempt from dangerous battle.

And so it goes …

We never know what’s around the corner. What we interpret as terrible news one day can turn out to be the opposite very soon after. ‘A week is a long time in politics’ Margaret Thatcher once said, alluding to the volatile and unpredictable nature of her reality. And the impermanence of everything. Politicians are rarely defined by what they planned to do before they took office, and more usually by how they handled unexpected events that happened on their watch.

Rather than entertaining thoughts about what may or may not happen in the future, how about letting go of them? Returning our focus to the here and now – i.e. the same place before we opened the faucet of speculative misery to full bore.

There is nothing to be gained by tormenting ourselves with futile, negative cognition, or by opening ourselves up to the media and others who have no interest in our mental wellbeing. We have agency. We are in charge. Let’s remain calmly in the present moment, and practice equanimity: we’ll see.

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Compassion: shift our focus from self to others

Most people don’t know that they have such agency. They are bound to the superstition that what they think and believe is the only rational response to what they perceive as the catastrophe unfolding around them. Political leaders and commentators often lack much awareness. Worse, those who have it may use it to manipulate people’s emotions for their own gain.

Compassion is defined as ‘the wish to free others from suffering.’ And we may consider those who have out-sourced the management of their own reality to the most malevolent directors, as the objects of our compassion. Why? The wish to help them to a more accurate – and peace-inducing - understanding about the nature of reality is one very good reason. Another is that when we support those who suffer, we ourselves are the first beneficiaries.

We can constantly return to our own feelings of distress and apprehension, thereby intensifying them and making them more likely to continue. Or we can deliberately place our compassionate focus on others who are doing far worse than we are. When we do, we find our own feelings are put in better context - and dissipate. This is the concept of enlightened self-interest.

We can’t help all the people who are feeling embattled, besieged, angry and devastated. We may not be able to help even a few of them. It may be too soon and their emotions too raw. But we may still cultivate our compassion through practices like tonglen, a meditation technique in which we take other’s suffering and give them happiness.

As a tool to counter-act our own feelings of disappointment, tonglen is extraordinary. Its use of breath is profoundly calming. Its focus on others’ pain is a potent antidote to our own. And its outward-focused benevolence has the effect of making we, ourselves, feel lighter, more expansive and benevolent.

I have provided instructions and a guided video on how to practice tonglen here.

Whether we choose tonglen or some other method, what matters is placing our compassionate attention on those who are suffering. Doing what we can to help them out of the snow-globe of thoughts and emotions in which they feel overwhelmed, to a more lucid, happier reality.

In giving, we receive.

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Transcendence: no mud, no lotus

One of emblems most closely associated with Buddhism is the lotus flower. Lotus plants typically grow in swamps, their exquisitely beautiful flowers floating incongruously above the muddy filth from which they came. Lotuses don’t grow in spite of the mud, but because of it. In human terms, we attain transcendence not in spite of suffering but because of it.

In the face of bad news we can curl up in a coma of despair. Or rise up, fists shaking in outrage. Both of which, in the short term, are understandable. But after that initial, emotional response, we may choose to view disappointment, distress, anxiety and so on as an uninvited mudslide which we are at liberty to use as we wish. And how better than to empower our journey to transcendence?

Samsara and nirvana are not physical places. We don’t need to die to move from one to the other. The way we experience reality - even the outcome of presidential elections – arises entirely in our mind.

When we find ourselves on the winning side, we have far less cause to question the happy tide of events which carries us along and ask penetrating questions about how reality exists – as it appears or as a projection of mind? As victors we have less reason to cultivate equanimity, to antidote anger with patience or deliberately shift our compassionate attention from self to other.

But with all this mud – wow! Aren’t we the lucky ones! Talk about a generous leg-up on our journey towards the light!

From a Buddhist perspective, life is short, death is certain and the time of death is uncertain. The only thing that helps us when we die are the deeply ingrained habits and conditioned impulses of our mind. Lying on our deathbed, the last thing that will be of any concern to us is who is in the White House. But if, through obsessing over the passing ephemera of politicis, we have created a mind that is habitually dark, agitated, bitter or anxious, what a terrible outcome for us.

We may choose to shudder through the next four years, transfixed by our devices as we follow the unfolding of each fresh horror. Or we can take up this invitation to let go of our obsession with external appearances, to get a grip of our minds by cultivating a powerful, disciplined meditation habit, and to create the causes not only for our own more enlightened reality, but for others to attain a more transcendent state too.

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Summary

Agency: we are not helpless victims in the aftermath of disappointing news. We are the controllers of our own minds and therefore of our reality. Where we place our attention, what we think and how we feel is our choice.

Equanimity: we have no idea how the future will unfold, nor is there anything to be gained from trying to second-guess events. Wisest to adopt a ‘we’ll see’ attitude.

Compassion: many people are suffering right now. In cultivating compassion for them, we help ourselves, including through meditation practices like tonglen.

Transcendence: we can be swamped by the mudslide of ‘bad’ news, or choose to see it as an opportunity to cultivate inner qualities to become more evolved, enlightened beings.

We can’t change reality. But how we experience it is our choice to make.

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In other news this week, Wild is Life/Zimbabwe Elephant Nursery, one of the not-for-profits we collectively support, offered this heart-melting image of a baby warthog who has just arrived, Miss Puddles. She is currently being bottle-fed and showered with the love these little orphans need to survive. I will share more images of her and the other orphans in the coming weeks.

Doing good for others in a real, tangible form is an important way to help foster our sense of agency in times of turmoil. My heartfelt thanks to all paying subscribers for helping make such a difference to these beautiful and vulnerable creatures. I am looking forward to providing you an update on our overall donations within the next month.

If you find the insights I share of benefit, and/or if you’d like to help Miss Puddles and others of her kind, please consider becoming a more engaged member of our community of compassion for US$7 a month or $70 a year.

As we think and act, so we become.