How to Stay Human in a F*cked-Up World

Mindfulness Practices for Real Life

Tim Desmond

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9780062857583
• eBook ISBN: 9780062857590
• Subtopic: Personal Success

The book that bridges the gap between the ancient practice of mindfulness and modern life. "Brimming with invaluable nuggets of practical spirituality." —Tara Brach, author of Radical Acceptance

Tim Desmond—an esteemed Buddhist philosopher who has lectured on psychology at Yale and leads a mental health project at Google—offers a path to self-growth, connection, and joy like we've never seen before.
Despite an absent father, childhood homelessness, and losing a wife to cancer, Desmond has emerged with not only inner strength and joyful resilience, but also a deep understanding of human suffering necessary to advocate for those hurting all over the world. Through his work, Desmond realized the truth: we don't need a mindfulness practice for productivity or sleep, and it shouldn't come from religion, philosophy, or hypothetical situations. Instead, mindfulness should be rooted in the pain, sadness, loneliness, and trauma of the here and now, because it is the only true antidote for this sometimes-miserable world we call home.

"Real and wise." —Jack Kornfield, author of The Wise Heart

Chapter 1

Something Deeper Than Despair

I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.

—TA-NEHISI COATES

On November 14, 2016, just six days after Donald Trump won the election, my wife, Annie, woke up in the middle of the night in excruciating pain. A trip to the ER revealed that the cancer she’d been fighting for more than a year had spread into her abdomen and a tumor was blocking her left kidney. Several long hours later, she emerged from surgery with a plastic tube implanted in her side that drained urine into a bag. I was told that she’d likely have this tube for the rest of her life. When our three-year-old son visited, I had to teach him not to touch his mom’s tube.

That was a moment I could hear despair calling me—almost audibly. It said, “Your life is shit. Everything is completely fucked. Your best option is to go cower in the corner.”

In that intense moment, I thought of a story I’d heard the Vietnamese Buddhist monk and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh tell countless times over the twenty years I’ve studied with him. It’s a story about a banana tree and it goes like this:

One day, Thich Nhat Hanh was meditating in the jungle in Vietnam and he saw a young banana tree with just three leaves. The first leaf was fully grown, broad and flat and dark green. The second leaf was still partially curled beneath the first, and the third leaf was very light green and tender, just beginning to unfurl.

This was during the middle of the Vietnam War, and he was leading a huge organization of young people who’d help rebuild villages that’d been destroyed by bombs and napalm. He’d spent nearly every day with villagers whose lives had been ravaged by war, and he’d witnessed the deaths of several of his closest friends. The central question in his life at that moment was how to reconcile the intensity of his calling to help suffering people with his mindfulness practice. He knew that he needed his mindfulness practice to keep from being overwhelmed with despair, but how could he justify cultivating peace and joy in himself while so many other people were dying?

He was holding this question in mind and looking at the young banana tree when he had a deep insight. It occurred to him that the eldest banana leaf was fully enjoying her life as a leaf. She was absorbing the sun and rain, radiating beauty and peacefulness. However, she hadn’t abandoned the other leaves to pursue her own happiness. In fact, as she nourished herself, basking in the sunshine, she was also nourishing the younger leaves, the banana tree, and the entire jungle. He decided that human beings are just like this. As we nourish ourselves with peacefulness and joy, we’re also supporting the well-being of every other person in our lives.

In that hospital room, as I looked at my wife and son, I couldn’t avoid seeing how much they needed me. They didn’t need me to do anything in particular. They needed me to stay with them and help them to see that they weren’t alone—that life was still worth living. If I could somehow find a way not to lose touch with what’s beautiful and joyful in life—if I could tap into something in me deeper than despair—then I’d have something to offer the people I love most.

DEEPER THAN DESPAIR

Looking around today, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that our world is exquisitely fucked. Of course, there’s a lot of beauty in the world at the same time, but the sheer magnitude of violence, greed, hatred, and straight-up stupidity can be overwhelming if we let ourselves pay attention and care.

The terrifying part for me is what happens to good-hearted people when we get overwhelmed by all of it. We’re committed to paying attention and caring, and we refuse to escape into whatever privilege we can find. However, the intensity of suffering we experience poisons us, and we lose touch with our humanity. We either end up in despair on one side, or we fall into toxic righteousness on the other.

Toxic righteousness is a term created by writer and activist Starhawk to describe the anger-fueled self-certainty that pervades our political discourse. Toxic righteousness is what happens when we’re mere inches from despair but somehow summon enough strength to lash out instead of collapsing. In that state, we’re incapable of listening, and often don’t even see why we should, since our opponents are less than human. If anyone tries to say that our vitriol and indignation aren’t helping, we get violently defensive because we believe the only alternative is giving up entirely.

The challenge of staying human in a fucked-up world comes down to how we respond to the immensity of suffering that confronts us from every direction. Whether I’m suffering from things in my own life, things in the lives of people I love, or the pain I feel when I pay attention to the conditions in our world (and it’s usually all of those), I have to find a way to take care of the compassion in me so that I don’t end up overwhelmed. If I can’t, I’ll find myself in despair, possessed by toxic righteousness, or (worst of all) I’ll find whatever little bubble of privilege I can escape into and stop caring.

Once I understand that the suffering in the world can turn me into someone I don’t want to be, I become extremely motivated to find a way to stay human. I don’t want to stop caring, and I don’t want to drown in anger and bitterness. I want to stay present and be a force for good. I want to become Thich Nhat Hanh’s banana leaf with enough joy and peace that I’m able to benefit myself and others. I refuse to let everything that’s fucked up in the world strip me of my humanity.

FROM HERE TO THERE

How do I become that kind of person? How do I strengthen that capacity in me? What am I supposed to do if it’s not easy for me? What if I really struggle with anger, despair, and shutting down? Is it possible to change?

I can almost guarantee that when I was first exposed to mindfulness and compassion training as a nineteen-year-old college student, I was a much more fucked-up person than you are. I grew up poor in Boston with an alcoholic single mother. I was constantly bullied, homeless as a teenager, and I never knew my father. By the time I got to college, I was angry and lonely, and had few social skills.

When a political science professor of mine assigned Peace Is Every Step by Thich Nhat Hanh, it changed everything. I immediately recognized that mindfulness and compassion were exactly what were missing from my life. Then—as nineteen-year-olds sometimes do when they find something that makes sense to them—I immersed myself in these practices, often spending several months on retreat with Thich Nhat Hanh each year and following him wherever he went.

Through all that practice and study, I’ve learned to experience more joy and freedom than I would have thought possible. I’ve gone from being someone with an intense amount of suffering and self-destructiveness to someone with real intimacy and harmony in my life. If I can change, anybody can.

NOTHING IS FREE (UNTIL IT IS)

On the other hand, change isn’t easy, and it doesn’t happen on its own. It requires that we find ideas and practices that make sense to us on a deep level. We have to engage with those ideas and allow them to change how we see the world. Then we have to put them into practice and see what effects they produce in our lives. Finally, when we find a teaching or training that feels truly helpful, we must commit ourselves to deliberate practice. The more time and effort we invest, the greater the change we can expect to see.

But then something magical happens. The practices and ideas that used to require so much effort begin to feel like second nature. It’s as if you’ve put so much energy into learning to speak French, and then all of a sudden, you realize you’ve developed a little fluency. You can now have a conversation in French without much effort at all. In this case, we start to experience a compassionate thought arising on its own in a moment that would have triggered anger in the past. It’s the fruit of our dedication. It’s the effort that leads to effortlessness.

WORDS GET SICK

It’s possible to pay attention and care about the suffering in the world without letting it poison us. There is a quality of mind we can develop that allows us to stay present with suffering without losing touch with the joy of being alive. We can accept that pain is an inevitable part of life without letting that make us callous or uncaring. Instead, we can respond with radical acceptance and a willingness to do whatever we can to alleviate suffering.

The word that my teacher Thich Nhat Hanh uses to describe this way of relating to life is mindfulness. However, I don’t really like that word. Too many people use it to mean something entirely different from what Thich Nhat Hanh means. They say mindfulness is about taking deep breaths, sitting on a cushion on the floor, or watching your thoughts and feelings with disinterest—like you’re watching a boring TV show.

When Thich Nhat Hanh uses the word mindfulness, he’s describing a way of relating to the world (and specifically to suffering) that contains compassion, joy, equanimity, and wisdom. It is precisely the quality that allows us to stay human in fucked-up situations—to stay open, caring, and able to relate.

It’s possible for words to get sick and lose their meaning. When that happens, we can either abandon the word or we can try to rehabilitate it. I’m not entirely ready to give up on the word mindfulness (at least not today), but when I use it, please remember that I mean it in this deeper sense.

Regardless of what you want to call it, the ability to stay human in the face of intense suffering is something that’s in short supply in our world. It’s also something that we desperately need. So the next question is how to develop this capacity in ourselves. How can we learn to do this better?

I’ve spent my life studying this question, and I’ve come to believe it can be developed through training ourselves in a set of specific skills. This book is designed to help you develop the skills that will help you stay human—help you pay attention, care deeply, and feel connected—even in really fucked-up situations. First, you’ll learn about each skill. Then you’ll try it out until you find a way of using it that feels beneficial. Finally, you’ll practice it until it feels natural.

Chapter 2

Finding Beauty In Life

As stupid and vicious as men are, this is a lovely day.

—KURT VONNEGUT

When life is fucked up, it’s so easy to believe that nothing good exists—or even if it did, it wouldn’t matter. However, if you only pay attention to what’s bad in your life, you will inevitably end up exhausted and overwhelmed, because experiences of joy are the fuel that we need in order to be present with suffering.

Too many people focus exclusively on everything that’s wrong in their lives and in the world, and the result is they end up being too burned out to do anything about it. There’s a subtle art to learning how to be present with suffering in a way that won’t overwhelm you. Most of this book will focus on facing suffering directly, but the first skill to develop is how to find beauty in life. If you can’t do that, it will seem like suffering is all there is in the world, and that will crush your spirit. This isn’t a practice of “looking on the bright side” or some other way of denying real pain and injustice. Instead, it’s an essential skill for staying human.

In every moment of life, there are infinite reasons to suffer and infinite reasons to be happy. Our experience largely depends on where we’re focusing our attention. For example, imagine taking a couple of minutes to list everything that you could be upset about right now. You’d never run out of ideas. Now imagine taking the same amount of time and making a list of everything that you could be happy about, like the sky at sunset, the sound of rain, or the eyes of a newborn baby gazing at you. That list could be pretty long too.

So many of us believe that it’s impossible to be happy until all of our reasons to suffer are gone. Yet, we also know that’s never going to happen. There will always be reasons to suffer—small ones, like goals we haven’t accomplished or people who don’t understand us, and big ones, like war, poverty, oppression, and climate change.

These reasons to suffer exist, but they aren’t all that exists. For us to have any experience of joy, we need to be able to pay attention to what is beautiful in life in this moment. That doesn’t mean we’re denying the problems in our lives and in the world. Instead, it means that we recognize how tragic it would be to go through life ignoring all of the beauty and wonder around us. If we put off our happiness until all our reasons to suffer are gone, we’ll never have a chance to be happy. If we don’t feed ourselves with moments of happiness, we’ll have no energy to make the world better.

We can develop the skill of noticing what’s beautiful in life by training ourselves in the ability to choose where to focus our attention, rather than letting our minds run wild with worries and judgments. It takes commitment, but if you’re doing it right, it should also feel pretty good. We are remembering to appreciate the shapes of clouds, the feel of a cool breeze on our skin, and the presence of a loved one beside us.

ENJOYING YOUR NONTOOTHACHE

As we practice recognizing what’s beautiful in life, we also begin to notice everything that isn’t wrong. For example, when we have a toothache, it’s clear that not having a toothache would make us happier. However, as soon as our toothache goes away, we forget how lucky we are. Take a moment to see if you can actually enjoy...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Something Deeper Than Despair
• Chapter 2: Finding Beauty in Life
• Chapter 3: The Art of Unhappiness
• Chapter 4: Know Yourself
• Chapter 5: How to Stay Human When Other People Suck
• Chapter 6: Why Do Bad Things Happen?
• Chapter 7: The Art of Not Existing
• Chapter 8: Healing Old Pain
• Chapter 9: You’re Not Crazy
• Chapter 10: Becoming Fearless
• Chapter 11: Community as Refuge, Community as Weapon
• Chapter 12: Your Ten Thousand Hours
• Afterword
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher