When families or communities experience a crisis, the temptation is to look for an easy solution and for someone else to blame. The unconscious thinking might be ‘if only x hadn’t done y, then everything would still be okay.’ If we can quickly ensure that x no longer does y, then the crisis is quickly resolved, and our lives can go back to what they were before the emergency.
Of course, very few crises are this easy to fix, or have only one person or group of people to blame. Usually the conditions which led to the crisis have been festering for years, perhaps ignored or hidden away, and there are many people who should have acted sooner or spoken out. It follows then that the solutions may also take years and involve everybody to some extent, and that a successful outcome is far from certain.
This is where we can benefit from the ‘wisdom of not knowing’, what in Zen is sometimes called the ‘don’t know mind.’ For complex issues such as climate change, there is no one person in the world who has ‘the solution.’ We can make decisions based on the current best available evidence, implement changes in our own lives according to our values and encourage others to follow along, but we don’t know what the unintended consequences of our actions might be, or whether the best knowledge available now will still be correct in five years’ time. In Australia, we have plenty of examples where people thought they’d come up with a good solution, only to find the solution was far worse than the original problem it was meant to solve. A well-known example is the cane toads which were imported to deal with beetles affecting sugar production, and which have decimated wildlife in parts of Australia.
The wisdom of not knowing lies in the humility of accepting that we don’t have all the answers and can’t single-handedly solve complex problems. The wisdom of not knowing lies in the humility of accepting that we don’t have all the answers and can’t single-handedly solve complex problems. It is not a disengaged apathy, but rather a stance of remaining open-minded and curious about new information. One of our strengths as human beings is our ability to cooperate across large complex systems. Traffic flow in a large city is one such example – apart from the occasional rogue bad driver, most people cooperate on the roads, and are supported by a vast network of road agencies, local councils, road workers, police, town planners, and many others. If a car breaks down or has an accident in a modern city, help through the emergency services is almost immediately at hand. It takes a lot of complex organisation and planning to be able to offer such a timely response no matter where we are in the city. We tend to take this for granted, but it’s just a small example of how good us humans can be at working together to find solutions.
A crisis, because of its unexpected nature, tends to bring out the best and the worst in us. In the recent bushfires, while many people were putting their lives on the line to protect their communities, others were peddling outrageous conspiracy theories on the internet, or coming up with elaborate scams to swindle people out of money. It’s easy to point the finger of blame on ‘the other’. And while people in power do need to be held accountable for their decisions, we all have a part to play in finding ongoing solutions. Meditation can help us to sit with strong emotions without trying to shift blame outwards. We can sit in uncertainty, instead of rushing into looking for easy solutions. This can be helpful when our community is going through upheaval, but also for difficult times within our families. The meditation teacher Pema Chodron calls it being ‘comfortable with uncertainty’, and learning to spend more time in this state can be a powerful way in which we can contribute to the collective wellbeing of our families and communities.
Mindfulness practice idea:
Set ten minutes aside for a quiet meditation. If feelings of discomfort arise, notice how these feel in your body, being open and curious about your experience. How does it feel, to be able to simply sit with the discomfort?
Anja Tanhane