If Society Has Broken Your Heart

First thing’s first: it’s broken my heart too. I don’t know when you’ll be reading this. Right now I am heartbroken by the rampant police brutality that has resulted in the deaths of way too many people of color. I am heartbroken by the giant gap between the rich and the poor. I am heartbroken that our political system is, in my opinion, pretty damn broken. Maybe you are reading this at a time when the daily news is about how our alien overlords have really skewed the border situation so Earthers can’t get decent jobs. I don’t know. But if you are feeling heartbroken about the major societal issues in the world and I happen to still be alive please know that at this moment I too am heartbroken, so you are not alone.

With so much suffering in the world, it can be easy to lean into your heartbreak only to get completely overwhelmed. I feel that way sometimes.

When I feel overwhelmed I remember something I was taught in my Tibetan Buddhist traditions about society: society can be two people having tea. I’ve thought a lot about that. If you and I sat down to have tea we have at least two choices for how we spend our time together. We could either bash others, slandering them entirely, and complain about our various aches and pains and whose to blame for them. Or we could sit down and share our hearts, talking about what we are doing to help others or better our neighborhoods. In the former we might be more prone to whipping out our phones and ignoring each other, generating habitual patterns that are based in fear and distraction…