Not doing, not being the one in charge of what happens;
Zhuangzi, Ziporyn translation
Not doing, not being ruled by your own understanding.
I
…the regime of the Sun King is this archetype that insists that everything be light. That everything has to be subject to his rule of light; it’s a pathologization of the dark psychic life. So it’s the insistence that we ought to be well, and that we ought to be happy.
Bayo Akomolafe
Take a deep breath, hold, and exhale slowly.
Consciously manipulate and regulate your breathing to manipulate and regulate your emotions.
When my young son is overwhelmed by an especially potent array of emotions and I prompt him to take a deep breath he says the same thing every time: “I can’t do it. It won’t help.” He’s right of course, it won’t help. At least not if ‘helping’ means making his feelings go away or changing the circumstances which led to the feelings. Taking a deep breath won’t alter the environment in which the emotions came into being or that they made themselves known to him in that moment. At best, deep breathing will, temporarily, take us out of that place, ostensibly so we can better see the topography of our emotional landscape and respond in a detached and unaffected way. But as soon as we begin to move, as soon as we choose some path to take in response, we are thrown back into the wilderness of our emotions and are once more at the mercy of an environment outside of our control.
One assumption about this approach to emotional regulation is that emotions are located and bounded within an individual. But the cultural imperative to ‘calm down’ when emotionally aroused, and the physiological tools for doing do so, misses something that my child understands intuitively: our emotions are bigger than us and cannot be tamed by us. They are an ecosystem, a world unto themselves, one that we inhabit and participate in to be sure, but that nonetheless resists domestication and enclosure.
II
Sky gods think sunshine, abstraction, and ascension are the answer to everything. But the problem with the sun is that if it isn’t tempered by darkness and rain and decay, it tends to create deserts instead of biodiverse ecosystems.
The Flowering Wand, Sophie Strand
Unlike my son, my brother is unable to consciously control or manipulate his breathing; whatever benefit breathing slowly and deliberately affords is unavailable to him. In our life together there are many routine moments that reliably cause him a great deal of stress, anxiety, and emotional upheaval, no matter how many times I help guide him through it. There are some tactics I can deploy to temporarily distract him and avoid the worst of it (for both his sake and mine) but eventually and inevitably his emotions erupt wildly.
In the past I wondered if there would be a point at which he would realize that these situations, necessary for his care, are essential and unavoidable, and that despite his strong emotional reaction to them he is safe—I am doing these things to help take care of him. In other words, when will he learn not to feel everything he feels, when will he learn it isn’t worth responding emotionally to those situations. Those techniques for manipulating our emotions or physiological responses to our emotions creates a sense of control: if I just manage to do this one thing then I can manage myself and maybe even manage the situation. While this can be true in certain circumstances it begins to break down when we try to manage or influence others, especially others who resist our regulatory efforts.
There is nothing my brother can do that will change his emotional response to those situations—situations necessary for his survival and health, I hasten to add, but that nonetheless cause him great anxiety. More importantly, perhaps, is the fact that there is nothing I can do to make him respond differently. We have, between us, no ability or skill or technique to alter the emotional current that frequently pulls us both under.
III
Every winter, with a ready tune, an ancient wind seduces the Bodélé Depression at the edge of the Sahara Desert. The Depression, might I remind you, is the dustiest place on earth, a 7000 year old graveyard that marks the site of a once great lake that is no more. The wind’s seductive tunes launch a grand procession, a planetary ritual, a burial ceremony that will carry the aged elderly shells of long-dead diatoms… across the curdling Atlantic ocean in lavish plumes of humming and moaning.
Now, if you had Icarusian wings and could hold your breath in outer space, you would be able to see this procession of dancing ghosts stretching from the African continent to the Caribbean, alighting on the grateful and verdant Amazonian lungs of this planet. A festival of the dead. The Elder Children of Homeless Wind and Dry Ground. A pilgrimage of bones.
Bayo Akomolafe
What is the limit, as an individual, of my emotional capabilities? my emotional responsibilities? It feels at times that what I need isn’t to have more or better control over my emotions, to know all the latest neuroscience hacks for emotional regulation, or even to have my circumstances excised of affective malignancies. Instead, it feels like what I need—what my son and brother need—is to be acted upon, to have the environment, both as an agent itself and the totality of countless agents, beings that are not me, acting upon me.
Perhaps then our emotions are not psychological but ecological, residing within and between the complex of relations that is our environment and our bodies. Maybe we don’t have emotions but, just as we are contained and bound to the places we inhabit, our emotions, rightly understood, locate and bind us to the landscape—our emotions have us.
IV
If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life, as from that dry and parching wind of the African deserts called the simoom, which fills the mouth and nose and ears and eyes with dust till you are suffocated, for fear that I should get some of his good done to me,—some of its virus mingled with my blood. No,—in this case I would rather suffer evil the natural way.
Be sure that you give the poor the aid they most need, though it be your example which leaves them far behind. If you give money, spend yourself with it, and do not merely abandon it to them… There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve.
Walden, Thoreau
When in periods and seasons of emotional abundance and its concomitant disorientation, how should I respond? what should I do? My instinct, no doubt cultivated and nurtured over the years by influences beyond my comprehension, is to illuminate the shadowy splendor of my psyche so that no emotion, thought, or impulse is hidden from the purifying light of awareness. This is what I think people mean when they suggest “working on yourself”—using our mind or intellect to leave no emotional stone unturned, to find each and every emotional erratic deposited by a lifetime of passionate upheaval and restore it to its proper place. In short: to be well.
An alternative response, contrary to my internal imperative to labor under the intense heat of the Sun King, is to heed the external imperative to cease all work entirely, to do nothing, to relax and recharge and recover. On its face, this seems like reasonable advice. However, personally, I’m unsure of what exactly this means for me on a practical level. What is it exactly I am supposed to be refraining from? It seems to me what is really meant is that I should simply not feel guilt or shame for allowing some of my responsibilities to go undone; that in the single-minded pursuit of rest I not do things that need doing and, moreover, be comfortable with that—including any inner work that I may be avoiding.
Whether I follow my instincts or the advice of others the end result is the same: the pathologization of any emotional experience that doesn’t lead to happiness, wellness, and wholeness. Implicit in this pathologization of our emotional landscapes is the belief that, as individuals, we alone have the power and responsibility to solve our own emotional problems, to overthrow the shadow and reclaim our psychic throne in the name of the Sun King.
V
We can never have enough of Nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and Titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets.
Walden, Thoreau
When I was in college I began an individual meditation practice, precipitated by one of my courses on Eastern religions. An instructor led a group meditation and invited us all to attend his weekly group sessions outside of class. After a few months of going to those I started meditating at home in the evenings. In the beginning I struggled to sit through 15 minutes but by my last year of undergrad I was meditating for 45-60 minutes each night, and I never missed a night. I still occasionally attended the group meditations but the bulk of my meditation practice was done alone in my room.
Shortly after graduation I moved out of state and I will never forget the first night when I sat down to meditate in my new place—I couldn’t do it; something essential had changed. I tried and tried and tried but whatever skill I had developed over the past few years evaporated in that moment. A terrifying flood of emotions rushed through me: what if everything I thought I was trying to achieve and accomplish, everything I thought I was doing by meditating, was just me preventing myself from experiencing all there is to feel? I, through years of hard work on a soft cushion, had managed to turn my lush emotional landscape into a desert. I naively thought that was the goal—to eliminate all the bad thoughts and feelings, to perfectly control my responses to circumstances so that no one, not even me, would ever suspect that I had feelings, let alone struggled to contain them.
These and similar moments of emotional crisis are too often psychologized and individualized, interpreted as both something that occurs only within and to the individual, and only something the individual can and should control. We are expected to navigate the wilds of our own minds and psyches alone, to confront the terrifying fecundity of our emotional landscapes and subdue it; to level all the mountains and fill in all the valleys, to even things out and homogenize our affective topography until there is nothing left but an arid flatland of equanimity.
VI
Spores are practically invisible, a shimmer of dust, vaporous. But while they are tiny, they are numerous. More numerous than just about any other organic component in the atmosphere. Every year, around fifty million tons of spores enters into the atmosphere. Some of those spores will immediately land in the dirt and begin, hypha by hypha, to root into the underworld. But millions of spores do something else entirely. Some make it fifty miles up into the air and ride the currents for weeks. They follow the wind. And, like the storm gods, they generate rain…
Sporulated storm gods come from the ground, like us, so they understand our soil-fed, rain-sweetened existence. They ring the wisdom of the underworld and lift it into the sky, only to pour it back into the leaves, the grasses, the valleys, soaking back into the dirt from which they originally emerged.
The Flowering Wand, Sophie Strand
Not only did I feel, as an individual, that the onus was on me and me alone to solve all of these problems, but even how I defined the problems—those things I had to avoid or manage—was interpreted through an individualistic lens, that, like a child burning holes in leaves, focused and magnified the Sun King’s gaze. Even acknowledging that our affective response to any given stimuli has a complex set of causes located both within our environment and within ourselves isn’t enough, I don’t think, because it still presupposes that there is only one agent: the individual. All other persons, human and nonhuman, are reduced to passive objects in the background of our emotional landscapes.
But what if the environment in which an emotion is experienced has more agency over the course of that emotion than we as individuals do? To what extent do our emotions reside within the environment and not only within us? Just as my son said that taking deep breaths wouldn’t help there are often times when there is nothing that an individual person can do to solve the problem, to manage the emotion, to make it go away. But the environment, the land itself, the entire web and network of relations in which we live and have our being, what if that is what is having an emotion that we wrongly locate only within ourselves? What if our emotions don’t belong to us but to the land?
VII
The Great Clod belches out breath and its name is wind. So long as it doesn’t come forth, nothing happens. But when it does, then ten thousand hollows begin crying wildly. Can’t you hear them, long drawn out? In the mountain forests that lash and sway, there are huge trees a hundred spans around with hollows and openings like noses, like mouths, like ears, like jugs, like cups, like mortars, like rifts, like ruts. They roar like waves, whistle like arrows, screech, gasp, cry, wail, moan, and howl, those in the lead calling out yeee!, those behind calling out yuuu! In a gentle breeze they answer faintly, but in a full gale the chorus is gigantic. And when the fierce wind has passed on, then all the hollows are empty again. Have you never seen the tossing and trembling that goes on?
Zhuangzi, Watson trans.
I am beginning to feel that there is nothing as an individual that I can do in response to these emotions that will solve them, make them go away, manage them, mitigate them, etc. My attempts to control or subdue or manage my overwhelming emotional states, not to mention the overwhelming emotional states of others, often ends up resulting in anxiety or avoidance: I, as the self-proclaimed sovereign of my own body, either do everything in my power to overcome these negative feelings by demanding they bow before me in complete fealty, or I abdicate my psychic throne and turn away from these somatic politics altogether, hermetically avoiding the responsibility to feel anything at all.
Our emotions, especially the overwhelming and distressing ones, are not something that can be fixed or eradicated simply by breathing or meditating because they aren’t ours at all. These emotionally overwhelming and tumultuous states are more complex than all the simplistic and totalizing narratives that I grew up believing. I inhabit these emotional states as a citizen, not as the ruler—they are located in the environment, and I am located in them, not the other way around.
VIII
Joy, anger, grief, delight, worry, regret, fickleness, inflexibility, modesty, willfulness, candor, insolence—music from empty holes, mushrooms springing up in dampness, day and night replacing each other before us, and no one knows where they sprout from. Let it be! Let it be!
Zhuangzi, Watson trans.
Framed this way, what then is there to do about our emotions or the emotions of others? Nothing, perhaps. The active agent is not the individual but the environment itself. There is no breath deep enough, no meditation long enough that will remove me from any emotional state in which I find myself—only the land is sovereign; I don’t have that power.
Perhaps what I really need in those most fertile of emotional states is some sort of practice or ritual that isn’t about me, one that removes me from the center of the world, dethrones me and overthrows the Sun King, nullifying his wellness decrees in the process. What if, in those moments of emotional turmoil, it isn’t about you and your psychological processes and physiological responses, but about something more than you, other than you? What if what is needed is to locate yourself among the Animate Everything so that you are diminished yet augmented into the whole landscape?
coda
Feeling like there was nothing I could do to alter my emotional state immediately made me think of the Daoist concept wuwei, something I’ve written about before, albeit in a different context. Wuwei (無為) can be translated as inaction, doing nothing, non-doing, noncoercive action, etc. I have usually conceived of wuwei as something that I, myself, an isolated individual agent, can practice on my own. The referent for the ‘doing’ and the ‘nothing’ of ‘doing nothing’ never went beyond myself—I was to do nothing, think nothing, feel nothing. And yet somehow everything gets done? That makes no sense to me when seen in this way. But if the world I inhabit consists of endless subjects and agents—the Animate Everything—then me doing nothing might mean something else entirely: I am acted upon by everything else, I am the thing that gets done when I am doing nothing.
If my emotional and psychological well-being isn’t dependent solely on my individual actions, what I do or don’t do, then maybe wuwei refers not to me as an individual, but to me as I am related to other subjects? Perhaps doing nothing is the path to establishing kinship networks with the other-than-human, the way in which I become incorporated into a broader network of relations—not through anything I do, but by allowing myself to become enlisted in the thinking, feeling, and emoting web of all that is.
…if we saw ourselves as between bodies, there might come a place where we say, well there’s nothing to do about that? There’s nothing to fix here. The feeling that I’ve just experienced is not mine, It’s the webs. Maybe what we rudely called depression is a seed dropping to the earth and experiencing discombobulation. And maybe we partake in these experiences more than we know because emotion is not ours, it’s not a brain phenomenon, it’s a territorial phenomenon and it enlists bodies in how it comes to matter.
Bayo Akomolafe