paulmuses

Those of us who have learned to manage our anxiety disorders may have useful lessons in this day of Covid. This is my contribution.

Have you ever tried to stop a feeling? Or a thought? What about a thought-feeling combination? For example, for me the thought ‘I will get the Covid – 19 virus if I go the store today’ is followed almost instantaneously with a feeling of anxiety, a tightening of my stomach.

Sometimes its the other way around. An anxious feeling leads my mind to search for reasons. These reasons or thoughts worsen the anxiety leading the mind to continue its search for reasons or what often happens to me, to latch onto a thought, what then becomes an obsession. To rid myself of this uncomfortable feeling I decide not to go the store and almost immediately my stomach loosens, as my anxiety retreats. Unfortunately, I have also retreated from life, even if only just a bit.

In my circle of family, friends and acquaintances I know too many people whose lives are in some way lessened by anxiety, just as mine is. What do I mean by lessened? There are things we do not do because our anxious feelings shout out there is danger ahead. This feeling – for me it is a tightened stomach, for you it might be some other physical sensation – stops us in our tracks. Something must be wrong, otherwise why would I feel this way?

About 15 years ago I was diagnosed with OCD, an anxiety disorder. What Freud once considered an untreatable mental disease is now, along with other anxiety illnesses, very responsive to treatment. You and I are fortunate to be living during a time when a variety of cognitive, behavioral and pharmaceutical treatments with proven track records are available, even as we all deal with yet another anxiety-inducing phenomenon the world has thrown at us.

Below are insights from my journey of recovery that may help you in this anxious time. I am not a mental health professional and so at the end of this post I list the books by professionals that were most helpful to me.

1. Our thoughts and feelings are frequently outside our conscious control. I grew up thinking I could control what I thought and what I felt. This is a cognitive mistake. All of us have thousands of thoughts every day, most unbidden. Feelings come and go, often without rhyme or reason. Or with a kind of reason, upon reflection. The sun breaks through the clouds and my mood improves. Nothing else has changed. It dips behind the clouds again and…

2. Our minds, hearts, and guts are unruly and we ought not take them literally. For much of my adult life, I let my thoughts and feelings bully me. While walking along a cliff I have the thought, ‘why don’t you jump off.’ Immediately, my stomach tightens as anxiety sets in. What could such a thought mean? Do I really want to jump off this cliff? I take the thought and the feeling literally, as danger signals, and not only do I back away from the cliff but stop walking along cliffs. I lessen my life, just a bit. Worse, I begin to doubt myself.

Although I have no genuine suicidal symptoms, I wonder whether there might be something wrong with me, something deep inside me I am afraid to face. This directs me away from the world and others and toward myself and too easily results in unhelpful rumination.

3. What we resist persists. What happens when I give in to the thought and feeling and stop walking along cliffs? I am training my mind to warn me about this danger. Something similar happens when I ruminate about the thought and/or the anxiety that comes from the thought. I take the substance of the thought and the accompanying feeling of anxiety as a danger signal and so whenever I come upon a cliff, my brain and gut work in tandem to warn me of this danger.

While on the cliff, I might try to argue with the thought, as in ‘I am not really suicidal,’ but that does not work because the source of the problem, the amygdala, has no reasoning capability. Neither of my solutions, not walking on cliffs or arguing with my cliff-thoughts, work because both are forms of resistance to the thought and the feeling. Anything we resists persists unless we…

4. We can train our brains to ignore the noise of our thoughts and feelings. A lot of the thoughts our brains throw at us and the feelings that follow are better thought of as noise and not as signals (see below Reid Wilson’s Stopping the Noise in Your Head). Noise because they seem to contradict our basic values or lived experience, as in my fear that I really wanted to jump off the cliff, or seem irrational.

For example, when I was diagnosed with OCD one of my symptoms was a compulsion to check whether the stove top burners were turned off. I would often check 20 to 30 times – meaning I would walk out the back door, to the garage and back again – before my anxiety would go down enough to allow me to leave the house. I treated the thought, ‘the burner might be on,’ and the accompanying anxiety, literally or as signals of danger. The checking compulsion was a form of resistance, a way of me telling my brain I might have left the burner on. Thus the thought and anxiety would persist until I retrained my brain.

How did I retrain my brain? Describing the protocol I followed is simple although doing it was difficult and took a long time. The gold standard treatment for OCD is exposure, response prevention. I would expose myself to an obsession, for example, that a stove burner might be on as I go to leave the house, and instead of returning to the stove to check, a compulsion and my usual response, I would accept and tolerate the anxiety while I walked to the car. Eventually my brain learned that I no longer considered the thought ‘the stove top burner is on’ a danger and so it quit sending a danger signal to my stomach. This process took many months and even today, more than a decade later, I still occasionally get a little dose of anxiety as a leave the house and wonder whether the burner is turned off.

5. Living with our fears. Too many of us in too many ways limit our lives because we think we fear some thing, like a crowd or Covid – 19 or a cliff. What we really fear are the thoughts and feelings about that crowd or Covid – 19 or that damn cliff. Two years ago when I hiked in the Alps, I knew my brain would send me thoughts and my amygdala would send a danger signal to my stomach. I almost said no to Rebecca and our host-hikers and to be honest for much of the hike I wish I had. But the decade-long work I had done learning to manage my OCD somehow kicked in and I hiked the Alps with my fears alongside me, as companions. Of course, they were always between me and the ledge.

Books by experts that helped me. Each includes material on all anxiety-related disorders, including OCD.

• Reid Wilson Stopping the Noise in Your Head
• Martin Seif & Sally Winston What Every Therapist Needs to know about anxiety disorders & Overcoming Unwanted Intrusive Thoughts
• Russ Harris The Happiness Trap
• Stephen Hayes Get out of your mind and into your life

Rebecca and I have been dreaming a lot the last few weeks. Anxiety dreams of all sorts apparently brought on by COVIT – 19 and its ripple effects. Every morning I ask Rebecca about her dreams and she gives me the details. If you were to observe this interaction, you would see Rebecca talking and me listening. You might even give me a ‘good listener’ point or two because I am making eye contact, giving positive cues such as nodding my head or muttering something like ‘uh huh’ or ‘yes,’ and even occasionally asking a question. To you, the observer, I am nothing like the kid in the comic strip who can’t wait to turn the conversation to what he wants to talk about.

Except that I am that kid, all the time. I just hide it very, very well. My mind is constantly urging me to turn the conversation toward what I know, what I feel, and what I want. When I observe me, when I look at me, I see nothing but selfishness or self interest. One of America’s Founders, James Madison, knew this characteristic of human beings well, and it formed the foundation for how he theorized about the structure of American government and especially the need for separating powers. He put it this way in Federalist 51.

If men were angels, no government would be necessary…in framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

By separating powers horizontally into three branches, executive, legislative and judicial, and vertically, into national and state governments, Madison and the other Founders used the human “me-tendency” to do the work of limiting the possibility of a tyrannical government.

But what about the tyrannical me? In every conversation I have, I see the little boy who wants his way. I am reminded of my selfishness. This observation, made over and over gain, allows me to anticipate. I have come to know what is coming and in knowing and accepting and not judging I am able to counter this selfish tendency by reminding myself to focus outward, outside myself, toward my conversational partner. Yes, I fail at this much of the time. But there is always the next conversation to try again.

Madison understood human nature and used that understanding to craft a governmental structure that has worked well for over 200 years. For you and me, learning to observe ourselves gives us insight into how well we handle everyday things like conversations. With observation we gain understanding and with understanding the possibility for change.

The next conversation you have, put your face on that fly on the wall and observe your words, gestures and thoughts. And then ask – is that person a conversational narcissist? The rest will take care of itself.

Brett and Kate McKay have written a terrific little article, “The Art of Conversation: How to Avoid Conversational Narcissism,” that contains lots of insights and techniques.

I woke up early Easter morning thinking about this Western Christian Holy-Day and my own religious journey. My mom was a committed Catholic and my dad, a self-described agnostic. He did not know whether a God or gods existed. He accepted my mom’s desire that their three sons be raised Catholic.

My mom’s religious gift to me, helped along by 16 years of Catholic education, was to embed me in one of the world’s religious traditions, a starting point of a journey. My dad’s religious gift was to unsettle me enough to never feel completely comfortable in the Catholic or any other religious tradition. Like him, I don’t know. Like him, I keep searching. Below are three insights I have picked up on this journey; links are provided to help in your own journey.

Pope Francis has said Catholics should not fear “that God allowed different religions.” Indeed, the fact of religious pluralism is all around us in this season of Beliefs. A very incomplete litany of religious celebrations for just the month of April would include: Western Christians & Easter April 12; Eastern Christians, on April 19; Jews & Passover , from April 8 to Thursday, April 16; Muslims & Ramadan, from Thursday, April 23 to Saturday, May 23; Buddhists & Buddha’s Birthday, on April 30 or May 8; Kerala Hindus & Vishu on April 14; and on the same day Tamil Hindus & New Year.

Are there common elements in this religious pluralism? Are the millions who celebrate these and other religious holidays bound together by anything you or I might latch on to? In The Heart of Christianity, Marcus Borg describes two worldviews relevant to this question, the religious and nonreligious.

In the religious worldview there is a nonmaterial layer or level of reality, an extra dimension of reality. This view is shared by all the enduring religions of the world. In a nonreligious worldview there is only the space-time world of matter and energy and whatever other natural forces lie behind or beyond it.

Similarly, William James distinguished between those who believed there was a “More” beyond the material world and those who believed there was only a “This.” The rituals, symbols, and beliefs pointing to “More” vary, by time and culture, but the constancy of the urge toward such guidance seems compelling to me. Comparative Religions scholar Karen Armstrong writes that religious traditions are…

“Like fingers pointing to the moon; so very often we focus on the fingers and forget about the moon.” –

Along with the millions around the world celebrating one religious holiday or another, I am unable to give up this search for the moon or the More. Religious traditions, however imperfect, offer the means many have used across time and space to look beyond the ‘thisness’ of the world.

Yet both the search and the end point are shrouded in mystery. Father Luigi Giussani in a quote cited by Irish author John Waters in Lapsed Agnostic writes this about the mystery of God.

Only the hypothesis of God, only the affirmation of the mystery as a reality existing beyond our capacity to fathom entirely, only this hypothesis corresponds to the human person’s original structure.

Humans have developed to pursue the unknown and to not take the easy path of certainty. This suggests a humility before that which we can never fully comprehend. Despite so much evidence to the contrary, true religion requires kneeling, in a prayerful gesture of submission. This gesture of humility is for me more than for God.

The recognition and welcoming of religious pluralism, the common search for a More, and the recognition of mystery are helpful companions during this season of Beliefs.

My mother’s commitment to Catholicism, my father’s skepticism, and my own refusal to say NO to a More join us together, again.

Another mystery.

A few minutes after I got up this morning I settled into my favorite chair, opened my computer and a soap smell wafted up from my hands. After weeks of thinking, with some resistance, ‘I should wash my hands,’ this morning I did it by reflex, with no conscious thought and thus importantly no resistance. COVID – 19 forced me to develop a habit I should have settled into long ago.

This noodling landed me on a quote I had put in my notebook yesterday from one of my favorite writers, Robert D. Kaplan. In a terrific book on Romania and the impact of travel on personal development, In Europe’s Shadow, Kaplan says the following about growing up.

You don’t grow up gradually. You grow up in short bursts at pivotal moments, by suddenly realizing how ignorant and immature you are.

How do these “short bursts at pivotal” moments work? The formation of habit is at play, as suggested by my mind linking the recognition that hand washing had become a ‘thoughtless’ routine, with Kaplan’s quote. Forks in the road are at work too, as in the most famous lines repeated below from Robert Frost’s most famous poem, The Road Not Taken.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

I’ve needed a lot of growing up so there have been many short bursts that included forks and habits but the following one sticks out..

It was the summer of 1965, I was 15 and in my first real job at Baskin Robbins in the Bettendorf, Iowa Duck Creek Plaza Mall.  Wendall Ginsberg was my boss and the first words he said to me the first day of a two week probationary period were “Paul, wherever I am in the store I can see you.”  Over and over I practiced scooping ice cream so as to form a perfect 2.5 oz scoop.

55 years later I cannot walk into Decorah’s Sugar Bowl without judging the quality of the scoops and whether the tubs of ice cream are layered properly. Mr. Ginsberg’s constant gaze forced me to develop the habit of doing scoops correctly and this carried over to other tasks.

What about the fork? In the summer of ’64 I had started and then quit a life guard course. In the winter of ’65 I had started and then quit a youth umpire school. Baskin Robbins comes along a few months later offering another challenge and I stick it out. A definite growing-up burst forward.

An addition to this story involves my first teaching job in the winter of 1973 at St. Johns Catholic Elementary School in Burlington, Iowa. I started December 1 because the teacher I was hired to replace was driven into early retirement by a notoriously difficult 6th grade class that as I recall numbered 44. Like most teachers in their first year I really had no clue about how to discipline this group. I remember in my mind quitting every night that first year. I stuck it out, learned a few good habits, mostly from strong women who wore habits, and until I wrote the paragraphs above did not realize the path I was traveling was chosen years earlier.

Growing up involves habit, decision, and mystery. Once habit is formed, a path chosen, the world somehow helps nudge one toward maturity. Therein lies the mystery.

Do you have a growing up story?

I ENCOURAGE COMMENTS AS MY THINKING ON THIS MATTER IS EVOLVING. FEEL FREE TO BE CRITICAL. WE ALL SEE THROUGH THE GLASS DIMLY.

How do you give Americans the freedoms to think, speak, worship, and organize and think that 330 million people will do this in a way that is anything but messy and at times just plain confounding?

Up until the 1960s, white, male, mainline protestants ran almost everything.  As a friend suggested in an email, even cheaply made westerns in the fifties and sixties taught viewers to see the country in a particular way.

That ‘consensus’ would begin to break down in the 1960s, when voices that had been ignored or pushed off to the side began speaking out, sometimes very, very loudly.   Future Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg finishes near the top of her law school class and can’t get a job at a top law firm in NYC because she is a woman and Jewish.

The Democratic Party until the mid 1960s includes liberals and southern conservatives who still despise the party of Lincoln.  The Republican Party includes conservatives and northeastern liberals.  This intra-party heterogeneity will slowly change beginning in the mid 1960s, with southern conservatives moving to the Republican Party and northeaster liberals to the Democratic Party.  Today the parties present competing visions of the country. This is what America’s polarization is all about.

The Christian Right will mobilize defensively against many of the cultural changes of the 1960s and 1970s, including abortion and the role of women, in the family and in the workplace.  The Democratic Party will gradually come down on the liberal side of these cultural changes and the Republican Party will come down on the conservative side.

Cultural differences are always harder to compromise than material differences.  Today, the biggest divisions in America are cultural, including the role of science and religion.

I have always believed politics is only necessary and needed when a group of people disagree about fundamental things.  If we agreed, politics would not be necessary.

 
In America today we are in the midst of massive changes.  Demographic changes that will lead to Euro-Americans becoming a minority, probably by 2050.  Cultural changes, such as gay marriage, representing different visions of the family.  Abortion, never really settled, is still a powerful source of conflict. Economic changes, leaving some, those with less than a college education, with flat wages for three decades.  These are globalization’s losers.  But there are globalization’s winners, many living in America’s large urban centers.

America’s politics is a mirror reflecting us back to us.  The ‘us’ or the ‘we’ in “we the people’ is bigger and more diverse than ever before.  No one wants to take a back seat.  No one anymore is ordered to the back of the bus. Everyone feels somehow the country is either slipping away from them or isn’t quite theirs yet.

 
The American ‘we’ is an evenly divided country where either side can win and so neither side has the incentive to cooperate or to compromise.

 
Until COVID – 19.  This virus doing what viruses do may help American political leaders temporarily suspend their winner take all perspective. Republican Governors (one example is Larry Hogan of Maryland) & Democratic Governors (one example is Andrew Cuomo of New York) have risen to the task.  Millions of people, self-isolating, have followed, doing their part.

All of this is taking place at a time of intense, penetrable and necessary polarization. Americans are treated to a real choice at the national ballot box, with each of its two major parties presenting a clear and coherent vision of what kind of country each envisions. The yearning for unity is understandable but except in emergencies a false and dangerous political idol. Division and conflict are the true friends of democracy because they are the true and faithful companions of human societies.

Democracy has never been harder in America.  This is because America has never been more democratic. 

Last night – what we didn’t realize would be our last night in Timisoara for now – we listened to Leonard Cohen’s Going Home. As I write my last blog from Timisoara the words below sit in front of me and capture my mood.

Going home

Without my sorrow

Going home

Sometime tomorrow

Going home

To where it’s better

Than before

We met so many wonderful people in Timisoara and wish we could stay longer. As I returned a few books today to the American Studies library at West University in Timisoara and walked the empty corridors I was struck by how grateful I was to have this chance to spend time in this place with these people and to share this experience with Rebecca. COVID – 19 and its consequences are bigger than any of us and it is time to give in to the reality of the situation and join the many who have had their own experiences cut short or their lives changed in ways they are only beginning to understand.

I am going home “without my sorrow” because this experience will live forever in my heart. It will continue to give back to me and from me to others. Cristina, Ludovic, Karola, Horia, Titsa, Laura, Mihai and…so very many others. I will never look at a map like the one below in the same way.

We are going home “sometime tomorrow.” Early this morning we talked with a travel company working with the Fulbright program. A kind, patient, and very efficient agent put together an itinerary. Tonight we fly to Bucharest and then tomorrow from Bucharest to Amsterdam to Atlanta and to Kansas City, arriving around midnight Tuesday. Friends are bringing Rebecca’s car to the Kansas City Airport and we will drive to Decorah, stopping briefly in Clarinda. And then self-isolating.

“To where it is better than before,” somehow, I think this is so. A mess in America I know, just as it is in Romania, with people out of work, isolated, anxious and fearful. People have died, others will get sick and die. Maybe you, maybe me. I don’t know what to make of all of this. I have no answers so how could home be “better than before?” Except for this, when we go home we know we will have two weeks of self-isolation. Millions of others are doing the same, mostly without anyone following them around to see if they are doing the right thing, meaning the right thing for others as well as for themselves.

We left America as individuals; we are coming home as Americans.

In 2008, America elected Barack Hussein Obama, a racial minority, President. African-Americans make up 13% of America’s population.

In 2014, Romania elected Klaus Werner Iohannis, an ethnic German, President. Romanians of German descent make up less than 1% of Romania’s population.

I asked my two classes of American Studies students if they thought the election in 2014 and re-election in 2019 of Iohannis marked as big a leap forward in Romania as Obama’s 2008 and 2012 victories symbolized for millions of Americans, including me. They nodded yes in unison and several talked about how Iohannis’ German ancestry was used against him, especially in the election of 2014.

President Iohannis is the first ethnic minority to be elected President of Romania. Iohannis is also a protestant (a member of the German-speaking Lutheran Church) in a country that is 80% Eastern Orthodox. As I was thinking about how I am connected to two countries that broke with tradition in exceptional ways, I remembered the Luther College Alumni tour to Ireland and Northern Ireland Rebecca and I led last fall. And another tradition-breaking politician popped into my head.

In 2017, Ireland’s first gay Taoiseach (Prime Minister), Leo Varadkar, assumed office. Varadkar’s Hindu father was born in India, Catholic mother in Ireland where Varadkar was raised a Catholic.

I have lived or traveled in three countries this past year, with each collectively deciding to break with the past in ways I consider signs of progress. Race in America, ethnic identity in Romania, and sexual orientation in Ireland are no longer insurmountable obstacles to rising to the top of politics and other professions in each country. This is a better world in so many ways than the world I was born into in 1949. Some things that were considered impossible have now become reality. Racism, ethnocentrism, and homophobia are still with us, but with less-lasting force and mostly in defensive, backs-against-the-wall postures.

Of course, not everyone thinks the Obama, Iohannis and Varadkar stories are good news stories. What some call progress never comes without a struggle and there is always the possibility of backlash. That is the central argument of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. She writes about how when slavery, America’s first racial caste system, ends in 1865 it is followed two decades later by the imposition of Jim Crow laws across the American south. When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 end Jim Crow, America declares a war on drugs, a new ‘Jim Crow caste system’ that disproportionately incarcerates African Americans.

Is the election of Donald Trump in 2016 another form of backlash against the two terms of America’s first African-American president? What do you think? It is a question my Romanian students and I will talk about in our next on-line class session. There is no simple answer and I am interested in what you think.

Last Friday, all 500 Fulbright recipients around the world received the following notification from the American State Department.

ECA strongly advises all current U.S. Fulbright participants to make arrangements to depart their country of assignment as soon as possible.

The 500 include 28 in Romania, and five in Timisoara plus dependents and partners. The Romanian Fulbright Commission – located in Bucharest – has handled this situation with candor, transparency, and sensitivity. They have made it clear the decision is up to each of us and they will support us as best they can if and when we decide to leave. Regardless of whether we stay or leave, Fulbright benefits will continue and the expectation is we will fulfill our university and other commitments in whatever ways possible from wherever we are in the world.

For now, Rebecca and I have decided to stay in Romania.

We started out sharing with each other our initial reactions to the notification. We then looked carefully at the Romanian Fulbrighters’ email thread and the reasons given for why others were staying and leaving. Both of our families were brought into the conversation through Whats App, FaceTime and messaging. From many voices and perspectives, we slowly began to coalesce around the ‘stay’ option. Why?

We both have individual projects to complete. Rebecca’s project is to learn Romanian in the best way possible, by interacting with Romanians. She has committed hours of study for months on Duolingo and now is the time and Timisoara and Romania is the place to fulfill this dream, of truly learning a ‘foreign’ language.

My project, for which I also have prepared for months, is to teach Romanian students and other audiences about American democracy. West University of Timisoara has suspended all on-campus classes and other activities until March 22 and the arrangements I had been making with community groups for lectures have also been postponed. On-line teaching will go on and lecturing to community groups could go on, regardless of my location. However, like Rebecca, my project is best done in this place, at this time.

We have a partner-project to complete. We pride ourselves on being travelers and not tourists having been schooled well by wonderful tour guides including Nino Giovanetti in Rome, Mohammed Oujrid in Morocco, Michael Cooper in Ireland & Northern Ireland and Liviu Samoilă in Timisoara. Each reinforced the idea that to be a traveler means to connect with the people in a new place and immerse ourselves in the culture of this new place.

Our individual and partner-projects pull us toward staying in Romania. What magnifies this centripetal force are both the people we have met, welcoming and friendly, and the attitude toward the things that happen in the world that are outside the control of any of us, an attitude described by one of our Romanian friends as “shit happens.” Understandable in a country with Romania’s history, with invader after invader. This is so refreshing to Rebecca and I who, as Americans, tend to be personally offended whenever bad things happen, as if America and its people are immune to history. This humility is an antidote to our reflexive arrogance.

The spectacle of lines at American airports and the slow response to the pandemic by America’s government is a centrifugal force pushing us away. We feel safer here for now. We also know that Americans, not uniquely or even exceptionally, like Romanians, will respond to this crisis in enlightened self-interest ways that will eventually flatten the pandemic-spread curve.

Over the past week or so I have been thinking about one of my favorite stories, about a farmer and his horse. One version written by Dennis Adsit is repeated below.

There is a Taoist story of an old farmer who had worked his crops for many years. One day his horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit. “Such bad luck,” they said sympathetically.

“Maybe,” the farmer replied.

The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses. “How wonderful,” the neighbors exclaimed.

“Maybe,” replied the old man.

The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. The neighbors again came to offer their sympathy for what they called his “misfortune.”

“Maybe,” answered the farmer.

The day after, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army. Seeing that the son’s leg was broken, they passed him by. The neighbors congratulated the farmer on how well things had turned out.

“Maybe,” said the farmer.

I carry the sense of this story with me wherever I go. It seems especially useful in difficult times. I wonder if the COVID – 19 pandemic will give enough people in the world an experiential opportunity to practice the discipline and sacrifices that will surely be necessary right around the corner, with the looming consequences of global warming. Is the COVID – 19 pandemic only a bad thing? “Maybe”

Rebecca arrived in Timisoara last Thursday and you see her below focused – oh, how focused she gets – learning Romanian on Duolingo. She has been working on this Latin language for several months and has moved through basic, first and second levels into level three on prepositions. Me? Well, read on.

Fortunately, West University at Timisoara is offering a Beginning Romanian course and is generously allowing us to take the class, 6 – 7:30 PM on Thursday and Fridays. We have a phenomenal language teacher who gently chastised Rebecca and I last Friday because she wasn’t sure we were following along on our phones. Did she think we were checking our emails? Since I had not been on this side of the classroom since 1982, this was yet another new experience or, as they say in Romania, o altă experiență nouă.

Last Thursday afternoon a few hours after Rebecca arrived we were walking in a light rain to West University to our first language class. We turned to each other and said, almost in unison, ‘can you believe we are doing this?’ I am sure we said something similar in January 2018 soon after we arrived in Malta to begin our work directing Luther College’s Malta program. For me, there is a kind of terror beneath this question as well as confidence slowly built up over the years, from doing what I did not think I could do. Terror & confidence, what Jung called the tension of opposites.

Somehow I have learned to live with this tension. What does this mean, to live with the tension between negative and positive feelings or the thoughts that produce these feelings? The first week in Romania my mind sent me unbidden questions, such as ‘what if I lost my glasses? or ‘what if the security guard roaming Kaufland’s supermarket stopped me to ask what is in my backpack and because I never finished the basic level of Romanian on Duolingo all I can say is ‘nu știu limbo română?’ The ‘what ifs’ came fast and furious followed inevitably by a tightening in my stomach, which I have come to recognize as my amygdala firing off warning signals. A sense of panic lie just below the surface of my consciousness.

What do you do with anxiety? Or with the negative thoughts that trigger anxious feelings? Distraction can work, for a short time. However, old thoughts come back or new ones appear, as in yesterday I heard from a West University colleague that a university employee had been exposed to COVID – 19 and was staying home from work, but surely there are others and ‘what if…?’

Or you can argue with the thoughts or feelings, as in ‘I shouldn’t feel this way’ or ‘I shouldn’t be afraid’ or ‘Timisoara has 300,000 people and ‘I am unlikely to come in contact with the few who have been exposed.’ Arguing with your mind is arguing with an opponent who is constantly changing shape. You can’t win. Your mind will manufacture counter-argument after counter-argument.

Or you can give in to anxious feelings and stop doing something that brings on anxiety. I know many people who don’t do something they want to do because of anxious feelings. Their lives are constricted. Truth be told, learning a different language was never easy for me and so my mind during my Romanian Duolingo lessons in Decorah was always chattering away usually with the message of ‘you can’t do this.’ So I eventually stopped. When the opportunity to take this Romanian course in Timisoara came along, Rebecca needed to push me. None of what I say below has worked perfectly for me and it won’t for you. But if you are someone who is not doing something you want to do because of anxious thoughts and feelings read on. There is help out there and scientifically proven paths forward. (Please feel free to contact me for additional sources and perhaps some sharing of my own struggles with anxiety that might be useful to you.)

Over the years I have learned a few valuable skills to help me deal with anxious thoughts and feelings. In this blog I will write about my experience with the skill of meditation and describe other skills in future blogs. Investigating the skill of meditation made sense to me once I learned the profound insight that I cannot control my thoughts and feelings. They are unruly, come out of nowhere, and rarely last very long. If you are someone who is burdened by unwanted thoughts and feelings, two books that have been helpful to me are The Worry Trap by Chad LeJeune and Stopping the Noise in Your Head by Reid Wilson.

I started meditating a few years ago, about 10 minutes a day, the kind of mediation where I focus on in-and-out breaths while observing my mind and body at work. After just a few sessions I learned how active especially my mind was, with thoughts coming and going, like planes landing and taking-off at a busy airport. Slowly I came to accept how dynamic this mind and body-work is and thus to fear less any one particular thought or feeling.

Meditation is a skill that easily can become a habit. It is perfect for a perfectionist like me because the point of my little meditation practice is to simply observe my mind and body. I am not trying to change anything but the simple act of observing has gradually taken the scariness out of my thoughts and feelings. This makes it easier to accept the panic I felt during the first weeks in Romania, even to welcome it, and bring it along with me as I do what it is I am supposed to be doing here. A really good book on both the science of meditation and some useful ‘how to’s’ is Robert Wright’s Why Buddhism is True.

The cognitive insight that one cannot control thoughts and feelings along with the behavioral work of observing this unruly mind and body armors one against the inevitable negative thoughts and feelings that come naturally in this imperfect world we live in.

This insight and the skill of meditation don’t cure COVID – 19 or calm the Stock Market or persuade one’s political adversary or help us learn Romanian but together they are an antidote to the inevitable vicissitudes of the world, wherever you are.

The greatest speech, The Gettysburg Address, by America’s greatest president, Abraham Lincoln, begins with the words

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Lincoln speaks these words in 1863 when America’s Civil War has turned favorably to the North. “Four score and seven years” ago points to the Declaration of Independence (1776) and its words about equality and not the Constitution (1789) and its acceptance of slavery, as America’s key founding document.

It is Lincoln’s way of saying the “We” in the first words of America’s Constitution, “We the people”, is to be expanded to include former slaves. One way to see the history of American politics is to see it as a continuous struggle over the question “who are we?” Today, more groups than ever are part of this struggle to determine the identity of the country.

That’s one major reason for the intensity of America’s current polarization and was on my mind as I walked yesterday through Timisoara’s Piata Victoriei or Victory Square. The Romanian Revolution of 1989 (one.five score one year ago) began in Timisoara and in Victoriei Square on December 20, 1989 Timisoara was proclaimed the first independent city in Romania. Below is what will become Piata Victoriei that day.

Victory Square looks like this today.

The Wikipedia entry on the Romanian Revolution is very good and thorough. Read that entry and then give a look at a nine minute video clip of the last European Communist leader to leave office, Nicolae Ceausescu. General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party Ceausescu is giving what we know is his last speech on December 21, 1989, from the balcony of the Communist Party Headquarters in Bucharest. Below is a comment by one of the clip’s viewers.

This moment right here has fascinated me for years! We all hear and read about how the different regimes of the era came to an end but to see it play out before your eyes is chilling!! This guy was literally “the man” for 24 years and within a matter of seconds it’s all over! To see the look of fear and confusion on his face when he realizes his gig is up is so haunting! It’s just so unique and amazing to watch this unfold right before our eyes and his! Definitely one of the most interesting parts of history during that time!

Every time I see this video clip I respond in the same way as this reviewer. Ceausescu had cut short a visit to Iran when the revolution started in Timisoara several days earlier and spread quickly across the county. Ironically, it started in Timisoara over the regime’s treatment of a Hungarian priest who had criticized the government and was being evicted from his house. Not only was Ceausescu confused as he looks out over Bucharest’ own Victory Square, he tries to buy-off the people, offering increases in wages, pensions and children’s allowances. He is standing on the balcony with his wife Elena who is Deputy Prime Minister, and other Communist Party functionaries and all are trying to quiet the crowd, to no avail.

Romania is now 30 years or one generation into its development as a modern democracy. On this Fulbright adventure, I am tasked with helping Romanians understand the development of America’s own modern democracy. Below are the students in my two classes at West University in Timisoara. All are working toward MA’s in American Studies. Most of them work at least part time and are taking six courses per term. In Romania the undergraduate degree is done in three years. The MA program will take two more.

I asked the students why they were interested in the American Studies program. One young woman gave a very interesting answer that relates in a way to both America and Romania. She said America offers us an opportunity to learn the good and the bad, of what works and what does not. What an intelligent answer! These students do not want a sanitized version of America.

In 1989 democracy and capitalism won the day over communism and socialism, in Romania and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. However, neither politics nor economics is working very well for too many in America and I suspect in Romania as well.

I think a close and honest look at American democracy or really any democracy can suggest that once the “we” includes all equally, governing gets harder and not easier. There is no end point to democracy, no finish line. When functioning well enough, it allows communities of people, even very large communities like America and Romania, to live together peacefully, with their differences protected and intact.

1776 in America and 1989 in Romania were the starting points and not the end points. Neither was easy, both were bloody. America’s longer history at democracy ought to suggest humility and not arrogance. This is what we have learned. Perhaps you can learn something from our struggles and apply it to the specific circumstances of your country. Perhaps we can learn from you.

Humility is not possible for the Ceausescu’s of the world. It contradicts the logic of the systems in which they operate. Democracy, on the other hand, as my favorite American political scientist E.E. Schattschneider said, is for those who are not sure they are right.