Is It Just Me?

Handling Pre-Midterm Elections Anxiety

I chose this photo because it accurately represents my mental state when I think of the coming midterm elections. I don’t know where or when it was taken, or who is in it. But you get it, right? The hair trigger tempers, dry tinder itching for a lit match. High tension. Zero trust.

This is no way to live, so how do I dial this anxiety down? I hate to admit it, but I don’t always want to. I find myself actually curating things that amp the anxiety up. I doom-scroll. If climate change is my ‘worry du jour,’ I watch YouTube clips of cars and houses floating by on the shoulders of the Fukushima tsunami. Or I find equally horrifying Katrina footage.

If the subject of the worry is political, then I cue the January 6, 2021 videos. I go looking for any authority out there who’s as scared as I am…someone to confirm my fears about the upcoming midterms.

(Did you catch that? I go looking for it…anything to actively worsen my own anxiety.)

But if there’s really a storm coming (whether geological or political), scaring myself to death beforehand is not the answer.

What is this all about? And how can I be a better citizen while also becoming a more balanced human being in the face of national, even international, planetary turmoil?

A reliable tool for me has always been meditation — noticing thoughts. Watching the mind like you’d watch a gorgeous little waterfall feeding into stream that trickles by on a hiking trail.

Do you know anyone in the presence of a waterfall, who says, “Wait — oh my God, that drop of water! It has to go!” Or, “We have to fix these rocks over here, first.” Or, “No! Look, on the other side. That’s what’s causing all the trouble.” None of us do that. We just stand there. We watch. We sniff the air. We listen.

The ‘work’ of meditation is exactly the same.

But that’s on a good day, when you can actually make the jump from “What are we going to do about potential violence during the midterm election?” to “This is a thought, a drop of water in the stream of things.”

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