Ease as Crisis Care
Skillful Effort Part 1: On overwhelm and imagining otherwise
Hi friends!
This two-part essay returns us to my series on the Buddhist Eightfold Path.
There’s seeing the situation as a whole (view), knowing your intention, speaking and acting upon it, with purpose (livelihood…you live in accord with your values), and a skillful level of investment. Effort is finding an appropriate balance between ease and striving.
As I wrote in the introductory post to this series:
Skillful effort isn’t “nirvana or bust.” Effort’s internal list pertains to guarding against greed, hatred, and delusion, and building up reserves of compassion and wisdom. Thích Nhất Hạnh says skillful effort “is nourished by joy and interest. If your practice does not bring you joy, you are not practicing correctly.”
Talks on effort often reference a stringed instrument called a lute. If the strings are too tight (over-extension) or too loose (lax), the music doesn’t sound right.
As Pema Chödrön reminds us, “learning to be not too tight and not too loose is an individual journey through which you discover how to find your own balance: how to relax when you find yourself being too rigid; how to become more elegant and precise when you find yourself being too casual.” No one can tune your lute for you.
Perhaps ironically for a topic on not striving, I’ve written a two-part article split into four sections:
The effort to imagine
The effort to acknowledge
The effort to engage as oneself with others*
The effort to stay awake*
*To be covered next time.
As you’ll see in the next section, when survival mode kicks in, it can be hard to pull back and rest. Ease, though, can promote crisis care. It provides more room to breathe, see the bigger picture, and respond rather than react.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination — Mary Oliver, ”Wild Geese”
The Effort
A skillful degree of effort requires listening to your body. As you read this section, keep checking in with yourself. It might feel heavy. Let this be practice. Tune your lute. Skipping ahead is fine.
In 2020, I lived in a <300-square foot apartment with a layout so convoluted a friend said it reminded them of the game Mouse Trap.
I woke up to the polycrisis1 in 2019 and a pandemic managed by someone suggesting we drink bleach did not abate my ravenous consumption of doom.2 (Note: only if you’re up for it, I’ve expanded on these points in the footnotes.)
In those early stay-at-home days, I begged my partner to move in because my mind was not a friendly place. She obliged. We broke up before summer.
With smoke from nearby looted stores lingering in my non-insulated apartment, without power or internet after someone lit the electric poles on fire, I began stockpiling water, canned food, and first aid supplies. With only one 2x2’ closet, everything was everywhere.
When friends laughed off my concerns about ecological and sociopolitical precarity, I’d fumble for my other topic du jour: the neurological impacts of relinquishment. Did you know being surrendered by one’s biological parents is actually a brain trauma that increases the likelihood for a disorganized attachment style? Almost to prove it, I gradually lost, repelled, or abandoned most friendships.
That summer, my cat Fischer was diagnosed with kidney disease. Portman had his first bout with pancreatitis.
In the fall of 2020, I was up for departmental review, with my chair randomly logging in to my version of Zoom university to assess my eligibility for longer-term employment. Any contingent faculty member knows this specific juncture at that time held real odds of losing my income and health insurance.
Meanwhile, I initiated an emotionally exhausting legal case. This was an important venture toward agency…and I was so tired.
I actively avoided asking my adoptive mother for anything. But over the phone, I asked her to please come see me. She couldn’t leave her vacation home in San Diego.
My lifelines were my cats, online meditation communities (thank you, Spirit Rock, East Bay Meditation Center, and NY Insight), and my therapist, Nancy.
Nancy suggested I plan a vacation.
“I can’t afford a vacation.”
“Could you plan a future one? Could you try?”
More out of academic habit than interest, I did the homework.
And four years later, I’m so glad I made the effort.
“We all, adults and children, have an obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine. It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that we are in a world in which society is huge and the individual is less than nothing: an atom in a wall, a grain of rice in a rice field. But the truth is, individuals change their world over and over, individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining things can be different.” — Neil Gaiman
The Land
Effort can mean the grip you keep on both grief and gratitude, material realities and imagination. Reality includes ease, exploration, and potential.
I moved apartments in September of 2023. I almost tripled my apartment size (feels like more, because the layout is logical), quintupled my closet space, and got new furniture.
A few weeks ago, I was flying over greens, yellows, grays, and pink granite that constitute the desert tundra of Canada’s Northwest Territories. The vast expanses of land hid nothing; the black wildfire scars contrasted the vibrant autumn palette.
At the lodge, my first activity was following a trail of ribbons to a lookout. I peed at the summit, reveling in how I didn’t urinate all over my pants and shoes. (After doing this two too many times, once at a protest, it’s a real concern.) I sat on the bench to marvel at the open sky, land for miles kilometers, and calm lake waters.
I remember my fellow guests mentioning how “quiet” it was. I offered that when I calmed my breath, I could hear individual leaves breaking from branches and landing on the earth. I could hear water running somewhere in the distance. I could hear my walking stick pull up from soft ground. Quiet, yes, and rich with sound.
On the second day, one of the guides, Cat, took me across the bay to walk around an otherwise inaccessible area. She showed me different plants made to make tea, and Inukshuk rock statues indicating someone else had passed through.
I asked how far she’d explored in this area and she said, not much, actually. I asked, can we look around some more? We continued until the woods were too thick to pass.
The density felt Shakespearean. In Macbeth, the three witches prophesized about Great Birnam Wood coming to attack Dunsinane. Macbeth is like, “Whatever hags, BYEEE.” Cat didn’t know the play, but returned that the trees likely shared roots. We were standing in a forest of trees feeding each other and sheltering everything that passed, including me and my reference to the Scottish tyrant.
Those shared roots can teach us about non-self and interdependence. Imagine beyond the family tree to a landscape of generosity. That’s reality.
That afternoon, I followed one of the lodge dogs off-trail. Upon return, I breathlessly shared, “Tuck’s a great guide! He took me off-trail to a bunch of really cool spots!”
The lodge manager said to stop following animals to random places in the untamed forest and reminded me the closest hospital was 2.5 hours away by helicopter. (The lodge isn’t connected to any roads.) Fair. Skillful effort isn’t hubris or ignoring our bodies and material contexts.
And YOLO. The final day, I ventured with no map, no trail, no GPS, and was rewarded with wild-looking mushrooms, flat granite slopes, and bridges from I’m not sure when.
This trip taught me to stay open, appreciative, and curious. I found a series of ribbons that weren’t a trail on the lodge map. I followed them for about fifteen minutes until, unsure of where I was and if the Blair Witch was waiting for me at the end, I turned back. The point was to engage with investment and attachment, not to get anywhere, not to be eaten by wolves. I interfaced with the fear of being lost, embodied anxiety about the bears we had already seen, and emerged with a keener understanding of my own edges.
To make an X-Files reference: the point is the wonder and joy, not where the truth is. I don’t think it’s necessary to go “out there” to reconnect with nature. This can be done locally: my bonsai tree yet lives and, remember, you are nature.
Yet, not counting Cat and canines, my exploration was done alone. In the next part of this essay, I’ll loop in efforts regarding community and managing expectations. So keep ‘em low. 😆
I hope you stick around!
Recommended Reads
I want to provide some names of folks I admire when it comes to climate communications and mutual aid.
Anyone that subscribes to me and feels things about climate should check out
’s climate wheel of emotions. Her recent piece “What I Shared With Doctors Picking Up The Pieces From Hurricane Helene” represents Anya’s trademark clarity, kindness, and intelligence. Further, she often writes as a parent, offering tips like how to reduce/replace ultra-processed foods.- specializes in incisive analysis of complex topics, ranging from politics to environment to meditation. His recent “Denying Ourselves to Death” is one place to begin.
- is a queer anarchist who often writes about mutual aid. “Disaster Compassion is Real in North Carolina” is a beautiful and engaging read about being on the ground. She runs the excellent podcast Live Like the World is Dying.
How about you?
Choose your own adventure!
How do you assess the right amount of effort?
When was the last time you explored an unknown area?
Whose voices or Substacks do you think should go on this post’s recommended reads? Why?
How are you?
Yes/No: Guacamole
Bio
Logan Juliano, PhD (they/them) is a writer and mindfulness mentor offering 1:1 sessions and group workshops for those working at the intersections of identity, play, and compassionate engagement. They currently teach at the University of California, Los Angeles and hold an PhD in Performance Studies.
When I use the term “polycrisis,” I mean the interconnected nature of our climate crisis, compounded by sociopolitical factors that limit our ability to effectively respond.
This term is overwhelming and vague and the most accurate word. Our climate issues don’t JUST include microplastics in brains, ocean acidification, the freshwater supply that is projected to diminish before 2030, or the topsoil erosion limiting our capacity to grow food. It’s these things and more, as they compound upon each other.
It is also the mental health crisis that makes this absolute failure “unsafe” to discuss, that freshwater and energy-hogging AI—with shady protections and permissions—is seen as a “partner” for critical thinking, and the geopolitical factors stopping us from uniting to address what tens of thousands of scientists are calling imminent extinction. So many of us feel bad, can’t afford a doctor, can’t think independently/think algorithmically, and live in fear. Polycrisis.
Back then, my digital diet included things like the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, that essentially said we needed to take dramatic, systemic, global action immediately (in the years leading up to 2019). Else, like 11,258 scientist signatories from 153 countries opined in BioScience, there will be “untold suffering.”
Spoiler: we haven’t taken dramatic, systemic, global action. This is why we have no time to keep going at speed.
(Ripple, William J., et al. “Corrigendum: World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency.” BioScience, vol. 70, no. 1, Jan. 2020, p. 100. https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biz152.)