Needed in This Crisis: Stillness and Laughter
By Day 9 of our sheltering in place, my husband had already binge-viewed Season Two of “Big Little Lies” and Season Three of “The Crown.” About every 90 minutes he would ask if I needed him to run out to the supermarket.
My answer was always the same, “I can’t think of anything we need.” To which he’d add, “How about a walk, then?” He’d read in the NY Times that walking outdoors is fine. It seemed a safe bet. The only human being I’ve seen strolling our neighborhood recently is the mailman.
Cabin fever is setting in at our domicile. The governor has asked all residents to remain at home for the foreseeable future, a hardship for many used to a whirl of activity.
I credit my frequent stays at Benedictine monasteries over the past several years with helping me cope. Because of those experiences, I’ve grown comfortable with silence and solitude. They’ve shown me that most of the talking that goes on is utterly unecessary. It is in silence that I find answers to many of my dilemmas.
The solitude of the monastery has taught me to slow me down. When I am alone, I become reaquainted with myself and the world around me. I am then able to be more present to others when I reconnect with them.
The writer Pico Iyer gave a wonderful TED Talk in 2014 on “The Art of Stillness.” Contrasting traveling with staying in place, he observed, “The best way I could develop more attentive and appreciative eyes was oddly by going nowhere, just by sitting still … Sitting still is how many of us get what we most crave and need in our accelerated lives, a break.”
He goes on to say, “I found that going nowhere was at least as exciting as going to Tibet or Cuba. By going nowhere, I mean nothing more intimidating than taking a few minutes out of every day, or a few days out of every season, or even … a few years out of a life in order to sit still long enough to find what moves you most, to recall where your truest happiness lies.”
Sometimes making a living and making a life are two different things, Iyer notes.
I empathize with my husband’s difficulty in staying put. He’s a retired judge who now has a small mediation practice. He is more accustomed to interacting with the public than I am at this point, “sheltering in place” voluntarily most of my days as part of my writing life.
Still, something he said struck me after I reminded him for maybe the 120th time to wash his hands after touching one of our doorknobs: “We used to have so much fun!”
He was right. We had wept together recently … watching cellist Yo Yo Ma play so soulfully a piece from Dvorak’s “New World” symphony on the PBS NewsHour.
We wept too thinking of our friends and family in Italy after hearing the latest grim statistics of illness and death there, and seeing video of Italians in a national lockdown singing arias to each other from their balconies.
But when, since this crazy crisis began, had we laughed together?
I couldn’t remember the last time my husband performed one of his running jokes, imitating a gag from the Mel Brooks film “Young Frankenstein” where a hunch-backed character named Igor tells Gene Wilder, “Walk this way,” and Wilder begins to walk bent over like the hunchback.
No matter how many times in our 15-year marriage my husband has done that silly gag, it always makes me laugh.
A friend directed me to a laugh-out-loud column on Garrison Keillor’s website. Keillor recounts walking outside his cabin at a resort, naked, to take a dip in a private whirlpool, realizing afterward that his door has locked behind him. Wearing a small piece of tarp, he sets off in search of help.
“I learned that a naked man wrapped in blue plastic does not win friends easily,” he writes.
“I knocked on the doors of five lodges with lights on and cars in the driveway and nobody showed their faces though I did see curtains move slightly … At the sixth house, a woman came to the door and opened it a crack. She agreed to call the resort office. She didn’t invite me in.”
The moral of the story: “A best-selling author is Somebody and a naked best-selling author is nobody in particular. You may be distinguished, but don’t forget to wear pants.”
Perhaps what we need to cope emotionally in this challenging time is both stillness and laughter.
Laughter reminds us of our common humanity. Sitting still, Pico Iyer notes, puts us into contact with ourselves. It can open the door to important insights about what moves us the most and where our truest happiness lies.
Can we look upon this time of sheltering in place as a chance to practice “the art of stillness?” Can we open a space in our lives for silence, solitude — and laughter — to enter?
Here are some links you that might bring a bit of lightness to these heavy days:
http://www.garrisonkeillor.com/what-we-talked-about-at-dinner-monday/
