I have found two go-to principles to preserve whatever integrity, agency, and semblance of sanity I might possess.

Keep showing up and protect my heart.

The specifics are malleable and the moment-to-moment strategies are situational but I keep coming back to these things and it keeps helping.

Showing up is maybe self-explanatory? If there are things I can do that are helpful, then show up and do them. Sometimes it’s activism. Sometimes it’s being present in scenarios with loved ones or students where they need a boost (not in that sense different from the “before times” but even less to be taken for granted now). Sometimes it’s remembering that all the OTHER, unrelated forms of human suffering persist except it takes more intention and bandwidth-allocation to extend a hand the person who is sick or grieving or otherwise under duress for something that isn’t foremost in others’ consciousness.

“Protect my heart” warrants a little more explanation. It is decidedly not a matter of putting on blinders and avoiding the hard stuff (though consciously moderating the what/how/when/how much/from whom of news consumption is certainly among the tactics I’m finding helpful – everyone has to negotiate that according to their own parameters). Rather it’s a more proactive attention to and nurturing of the sense of love that governs my life. In part that comes from remembering to tune into the people and things and activities that are genuinely nourishing. In addition, and maybe less intuitively in emotionally charged moments, it’s a staunch (albeit difficult in this moment) refusal to give way to painting those perpetrating or cheering atrocities with a broad and simplified brush of lesser humans unworthy of compassion.

In a recent talk, Tara Brach discussed (more eloquently than I will here, of course) how anger and “bad othering” are, from a certain perspective, alternate frames of reference for loving enough that you deeply care about people or things or outcomes that are threatened. This really helped encapsulate what I’m trying to cultivate – it doesn’t exonerate perpetrators’ cruel, shortsighted, dangerous, and hurtful actions or hateful words and quasi-philosophies. Rather it is a stubborn refusal to become spiritually jaded by the experience. Even if I thought that compassion to people brainwashed by hate or emboldened by greed was naive, then that’s all the more reason to assert that they will not be taking my goodness away, at least not without a fight.

It ain’t easy. These two edicts, keep showing up and protect my heart, are fragile (thus requiring commitment and vigilance) and they are inexorably tied. If my heart is filled with hate, I will invariably be depleted, to the detriment of my capacity to show up. And yet if, in the name of staying centered, I look away from the conditions that cause suffering in those for whom I am showing up, I can’t do so effectively. The whole thing is a daily tightrope walk and the moment to moment choices are often not straightforward. And to be bluntly honest, the modern-day polarized rhetoric, especially from the right, means that my capacity to maintain compassion with folks who approve of what’s happening now (never mind those actively participating in it) largely depends on resisting the urge to engage in direct “conversation” (if the exchanges of words from folks aligned with that side of the aisle to mine can even be called that). I wish I had a formula or a set of reliable rules or a fire extinguisher that I can squirt onto my brain when it overheats with anger. I don’t.

And yet, whenever I forget to tune into and reaffirm these core intentions, that’s when I start to lose my tethering. That’s when despair starts to sap whatever energy I may have to be a net-positive presence. But when I look at the people who remain engaged and maintain love in their hearts and souls I am inspired anew and reminded that it is possible and crucially important.