I’m Not Sure Whether My Obsession with War is a Feature or a Bug!
I’ve been aware since childhood that I have a somewhat unusual relationship to fiction, a part of life that we usually think of as nourishing our souls, or possibly just a pleasant way to escape reality. One of my college literature professors talked about fiction as “the willing suspension of disbelief.” At a very early age I discovered on my own that — when it came to frightening fiction — I could defend myself by reasserting my disbelief, unsuspending it. For instance, when one of my older brothers took me to a frightening afternoon horror movie during a trip to San Francisco in the late forties, when I was only about eight years old, I found I was able to save myself by thinking, “There’s a cameraman shooting this scene, so I know it’s all fake.” To this day, in my early eighties, I still use this trick to cope with uncomfortable scenes in movies, even for so trivial a “horror” scene as one depicting social embarrassment. It’s not happening to me!
The flip side of all this is my lifelong preference for non-fiction … histories and science mainly. Somehow I never feel as personally threatened by these genres. At the same time, there’s plenty of scope in non-fiction for the development of compassion and love for the world, and for life. I don’t feel abnormally stunted in that respect, or especially gifted either.
Nevertheless, it is possible to get too much reality, especially in the details of war. This is probably why my recent obsession with the wars of our century has made me doubt myself, doubt my ability to maintain a healthy relationship to that reality. I’ve begun reading about “engaged Buddhism” (pioneered by Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Han). How did he face the reality of war with any sort of equanimity (if that’s even the goal)? How did he both serve and love the world?
In my career as a network engineer, we often used the phrase, “Is it a feature or a bug?” My obsession with war, the most intense reality imaginable — which I’ve lately inflicted on the readers of this journal — has begun to seem like a bug! I need to return to some sort of balance, and yet even craving such balance feels selfish compared to the horror of the lives being lived and lost in the Gaza genocide right now.
Another Buddhist who has struggled creatively with the terrible realities of this world is Joanna Macy. Decades ago she developed a process called “The Work That Reconnects,” that (in Macy’s own words) “helps people discover and experience their innate connections with each other and the self-healing powers of the web of life, transforming despair and overwhelm into inspired, collaborative action.”
She refers to her work as a spiral journey involving four steps:
- Coming from Gratitude
- Honoring Our Pain for the World
- Seeing with New/Ancient Eyes
- Going Forth
The titles of several of her books suggest a Buddhist perspective primarily focused on love for the world:
I can’t find it now, but I recall a workshop years ago based on her teaching in which she asked each of us to imagine that we had decided to be born into exactly this time and exactly this place in order to do whatever we could do to heal the world and ourselves. Just imagining this is empowering.
I have no regular practice around any of this (unless it’s this journal itself?), but I’m moving slowly in that direction, keenly aware of how little time is left.
Don
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