Riding the roller coaster

The damage wrought to the historic Santa Cruz wharf by the bomb cyclone off the northern west coast of the US two weeks ago got worldwide attention. Thankfully, after two uncertain and distressing weeks, the municipal pier will reopen tomorrow. However, that’s not the end of the troubles caused by that storm surge.

Even though the remaining structure has been deemed sound, what to do next is tangled up in local and statewide politics as well as pre-existing lawsuits. Hardly mentioned in the news coverage, the gigantic waves wreaked $26 million of destruction to the inner harbor, leaving dozens of folks who lived on boats searching for housing and damaging many fishing boats. The unprecedented amount of sediment built up at the mouth of the harbor will take a long time to clear, significantly limiting sea-faring traffic for months to come.

Last week, crews removed the bathrooms from the San Lorenzo River estuary and cleared the main beach. Visiting Seabright Beach, barely a mile as the crow flies from the pier, I saw the entire stretch strewn with debris.

Much of the wreckage is composed of chemically treated wood, plastic, and metal. Unlike timber washed down the river and swept out to sea by the storms two years ago, the clean-up crew won’t bury the mess in the sand.

Last year’s roller coaster of disasters, both human-made and natural, and its political and personal debacles certainly have left many of us overpowered, overwhelmed, and fearful of what the future will bring.

I’m not here to point fingers, serve up some spectacular — but essentially superficial — solution, or tell you what any of it means.

I think we can agree that all of these events exist totally and absolutely in the world of things you and I cannot change. We might debate what effect we or anyone could or should have had in the past, but, right now, there isn’t anything we can do about them.

Today, I’m asking you to consider how you respond to happenings over which you have no control. None. Nada. Zero. It’s not as if something you have no say about isn’t going to happen, right? I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that most occurrences, incidents, developments, situations, and eventualities fall into this category.

In these moments, when you face something — anything — out of the reach of your say-so, the only matter over which you have any choice is your response. I’m not saying you shouldn’t react or that you can somehow determine how you feel. I am saying that, with practice, you have a chance, perhaps some slight chance, of listening with your whole self, finding the motivation within the moment’s emotion, and transforming that sudden or sustained psychophysical shift into mindful, heartfelt, affirming action.

Having the so-called “presence of mind” to do so, not to be swept away, sunken, or shattered by events, requires practice. By which, I mean having a practice, a mindful, dynamic, and somatic process. If it didn’t sound so silly, I might call this a “bodyiful” approach.

Your practice is when you take time each day, rain or shine, good or bad, optimistic or despondent, to work on and with yourself. You take a pause, step back, and notice how you are responding, at least for a moment, you so during many moments, one after the other, and over days, months, and, eventually, years. The steady, consistent, rigorous return to this activity constitutes, literally incorporates — as in making physical, corporeal — the ability we call resilience.

Having a practice is an investment in the inevitable out-of-your-control future; it’s how you develop a way of being, a sense of agency and an attitude of equanimity, to fall back on in times of stress and distress.

For me, it’s a matter of survival. I can’t imagine going through the epidemic and a double dose of cancer without Awareness Through Movement class to remind me every day, as Pema Chödrön so aptly put it, that I am the sky and everything else is weather.

The shape, form, or length of time of your particular practice matters less than its reliable recurrence. Whether you meditate, pursue a martial art or yoga, do Feldenkrais lessons, or engage in some other equally embodied approach, what’s crucial is regularly returning to and remembering yourself. It is by no means easy, but it is incredibly and entirely worthwhile.

It’s not too late to establish a practice if you don’t yet have one. If you have one, I’m curious: have you done your practice today?

I took both photos in today’s post. They are unaltered in any way.

The Giant Dipper roller coaster shown above celebrated its 100th anniversary last year.

(As Herb Caen — the sole reason I subscribed to the San Francisco Chronicle for far too many years — once wrote, “…the great roller coaster arose amid screams above the golden strand of the Santa Cruz Boardwalk … a tooth-loosener, eyeball-popper, and one long shriek.” When the air is still, I can hear faint, regularly timed, far distant screams from my window.)