My friend pointed me to a Rosh Hashanah sermon given by Rabbi Stephanie Kolin, in Brooklyn. In it, she spoke of the experience of Admiral James Stockdale, a prisoner of war in Vietnam for seven and a half years. The optimists died first, Stockdale said. They told themselves they would be out by Christmas, and then by Easter, and then by Thanksgiving, and then Christmas rolled around again. Stockdale said they died of broken hearts, but I think maybe they died of exhausted brains, which kept casting backward and forward to imagine solutions or ends to their present horrors that did not corroborate with reality. This is what optimism has in common with anxiety, a distorted view that pretends to be self-protective but is not. Stockdale’s fellow prisoners simply could not imagine Christmas without glad tidings of joy. What Stockdale recommended, instead of wishful thinking, was something more like realism and endurance. “You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end, which you can never afford to lose, with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.” We will inhabit a future, but we don’t know what kind. I keep thinking about what our children will tell their children about this time, how they couldn’t go to school, how they marched and their parents worried, how the government righted itself, or changed, or fell. However it goes, it will be history — past — and our kids will be telling it because it happened to them.
The people who study anxiety recommend something like Stockdale’s advice — a clear-eyed, present-tense look at the worst that can really happen instead of a frantic, reflexive habit of having expectations and making plans. Sometimes when I can’t sleep I make lists of the uncertainties haunting me, so they will feel both more real and more contained. There are tigers out there, so I will build a fence, but I know that tigers sometimes jump fences.
