Last week we started talking about joy again. Joy is the third of the four Brahmaviharas or sometimes they’re called the heavenly abodes – the four states of mind and heart that support us at any time, and especially in challenging times. The first two are love, or kindness, or lovingkindness; and compassion. In 2020, we spent several months looking at those. The third is joy, or actually sympathetic joy, and the fourth is equanimity.
I’ll start talking about sympathetic joy next week, but the last few weeks I’ve been getting a lot of JOY, talking about the joy we have in our own lives, how we can recognize that, how we can cultivate that. Which is different from sympathetic joy, which is taking joy in the joy of others. So let’s stay with the joy in our own lives, today, then start on sympathetic joy next week.
I’ve been feeling a lot of joy as I’ve been reading and listening to what President Biden is doing. Between tying climate change to essential government roles like national defense, to stating that anti-racism must be woven into the very fabric of government, my heart – my whole body – has really been full of joy.
Trying to understand on a little more granular level, some of the joy is because these policies are in alignment with my own values and the values that I believe underpin a just and healthy society. Some of the joy is because I’m not terrified every day that our country is pointing in the opposite direction from that.
And some of the joy is in feeling like I don’t have to carry the world on my own shoulders, by myself.
I think the sense of carrying the world on our shoulders is trap lawyers can fall into. Looking at the Four Perils of the law, or the ways we’re trained to (1) take on more and more work, (2) always be scanning the horizon for what could go wrong, what could blow up, what could go south, (3) be perfect all the time, and (4) live surrounded by conflict, it feels like that translates, for me at least, into a sense of holding up the world.
But exploring even further, what I notice is that that it’s about how much fear I have: fear of getting things wrong, getting things less than perfect; fear for the country, the world, the earth; fear that racism will persist and continue to permeate our lives, that my own biases will always be lurking under the surface, that we’ll never have true equity or inclusion in the U.S.
And getting even more granular, I arrive at the concept of control. It feels like there’s a part of lawyering and teaching law that’s about control: gaining control, feeling like we should be in control, being expected to be in control, being expected to retain control; being in control of the classroom, the syllabus, what students learn. Not just the responsibility to do good work, be a powerful advocate, roll up our sleeves and contribute and help change the world for the better, but be in control of things, somehow make sure they never fall apart.
At the same time, mindfulness offers a reminder that things are not in our control. That things are operating in some lawful way that we can’t see and can sometimes feel unlawful, but are nevertheless playing out in the only way they can play out, which is just as they are. This present moment – it is what it is.
And now we have a new president in the U.S., who has taken the reins and right away, begun to point us in what feels like a better direction, and I feel some real relief, and maybe the world feels a little relief, and it feels like this teaching that we aren’t in control, or maybe more accurately, that it’s not about control, is coming alive.
What I mean is, yes, there’s a joy in letting someone else lead, when they’re leading in a wise, compassionate direction, which can also happen when your firm or organization has that kind of leadership, or your school does. Or when you’re part of that: when you’re providing that kind of leadership or there’s collaborative leadership that feels wise and compassionate.
Because then, at least in my experience, it’s possible to let go of feeling like we have to be in control, are expected to be in control. Wise, compassionate leadership is leadership that it’s possible to accept by letting go of control, of that tightness, that weight on the shoulders. Instead of leadership and control being twisted together like a twist-tie, we can begin to untie the twist-tie. And sure, sometimes we go in the wrong direction and things get tighter, but then we realize that, and slowly, we untie these two qualities, leadership and control.
There’s a classic mindfulness teaching called the Five Remembrances, which is about letting go of control – still very much being responsible for doing good work, doing our best, working hard to change the world, but letting go of control. The Five Remembrances are, Number One, we grow old. Nothing can stop that. Number Two, we get sick. Nothing can change that. Number Three, we die: that’s difficult and sad to open to, especially with so much sorrow, so much death surrounding us right now; as one friend says, so many souls. But even so, these three are about letting go.
Number Four is also about letting go, realizing we’re not in control: it’s that we get separated from everything and everyone we love. We all know the truth of this. I’ve been listening to The Warmth of Other Suns, about the Great Migration of Black Americans from the South to the North and West of the U.S., by Isabelle Wilkerson who also just wrote Caste, which I’m going to listen to next, and she follows the lives of a half dozen people as they span the Great Migration, and I’m at the end so she’s at the end of their lives. And one of her characters is collecting funeral pamphlets, because she’s outlived everyone: all the sisters and brothers she picked cotton with as a young sharecropper, all the friends she made in the North: the arc of a life. So, Number Four, we get separated from everything and everyone. We have to let them go.
And Number Five is about how we do the work of the world. How we live our lives. How we lead. It’s that we have a choice, we can choose how we relate to the world, we have to choose how we relate to the world, because those choices matter. Our actions matter, our words matter. And whether we try to hold onto things and control them, and twist leadership and control together to try to hold on, or whether we let go, matters. Whether we let go and let our leadership emerge from wisdom, and compassion, matters. The joy of letting go INTO wisdom, INTO compassion, matters.
I think – I hope - we are seeing that happening in the U.S. right now. And I think we can each do that ourselves, as well. Relax our shoulders, let the weight fall off them, and allow not control, and not fear, but wisdom and compassion to be our motivators, our inspiration, the forces that propel us to do the good work we all do.