not doing

This is what I did NOT do today: I did not look at the news headlines this morning and other than this quick post, I haven’t looked at social media all day.

What I DID do was walk the dogs in the very quiet woods immediately following a rainstorm. The woods were beautiful, the dogs were deliriously happy splashing through all the puddles, and for a few moments no one else needed me and there was nothing else I had to be doing. I realized I was walking along with a slight smile on my face.

In Hermetic parlance, my experience today was “as within, so without.” Having not consumed and internalized a great external dose of anxiety-inducing media, I haven’t been anxious. And because my internal world felt more peaceful and quiet, my external world appeared a bit brighter, a bit lovelier.

“But, but, but!” I can hear some of you thinking. Let me reassure you that I possess a surfeit of outrage and anxiety about the current situation but I’ve come to understand that imbibing and redistributing it on a daily basis is a DO-ing that yields nothing but more anxiety and outrage for me and has the ripple effect of stoking the fires of these feelings in others. This is a kind of virus, too.

Away from all the various sources of noise this afternoon, it settled in for me that I can DO exactly two things that might yield actual change: I can wear a mask/practice social distancing and I can vote. The rest of it is screaming into a void — giving energy to, feeding — something that is making me unwell. My intention, therefore, is to do more of what I did today — which very much includes an element of NOT doing.