DYNAMIC CARE – By Jeff Warren
When you live on a ship at sea, everything apparently gets
amplified: ruminations, moods, behaviors. The signals bounce
around the narrow interiors, dramatizing our personalities
and quirks and various existential dilemmas.
Enter COVID-19, and the fact that many of us are stuck
inside. Ping ping ping, go the signals. I don’t know about
you, but I’m starting to get a pretty clear picture of what I’m
comfortable with, and what I’m not.
There’s never been a more obvious call to take care of ourselves
and each other. Everyone knows this is what’s being asked for.
Now is The Moment. The question is, do we know how to do
this? I mean, beyond the brilliant improvisations we’re seeing:
the impromptu Zoom dance parties, the backyard calisthenics,
the rotating food drop-offs for elderly neighbours. I’m after
something broader and more complete: a model for how to
think about healthy care and practice, one that will help us
survive the weeks and months and years to come.
Here’s what I’ve come up with. It’s so obvious it took a crisis
to finally rattle it out of me.
Call it the Dynamic Care Grid:
The most important thing to know about this grid is it’s
a scribbly human mess – and that’s fine. All four quadrants
are allowed and necessary, because they’re all about caring.
And it matters that we try to balance them (within reason).
Otherwise our nervous systems will free-run according to
our default habit patterns, and we’ll end up freaked out or
burned out or totally checked out.
“Change self” is about action. Activities you know
will keep your mind and body alive and learning. It’s working
out, it’s deliberately meditating on your anxiety, it’s taking
up painting and gardening and finally reading Ulysses. This
is about choosing to extend the range of conditions in which
your body and your mind can flourish. Instead of stagnating,
you’re alive to your edges, and work intentionally to expand
capacity and stay responsive to the changing situation.
Which sounds like a shit-ton of work! So we also need
“accept self,” which is about rest and kicking back and
flipping the bird at your various self-improvement regimens,
including my stupid grid. This is the deep skill of appreciating
your limits and giving yourself permission to lounge around
doing nothing, maybe watching Netflix, maybe lying on
your living room floor blowing saliva bubbles as you stare
vacantly at the ceiling. It’s sleeping in. It’s playing with your
kid, or your dog, or your genitals. (Yes, I wrote that! Screw
the self-improvement sensors!)
Of course we’re in danger of sounding a little too selfinvolved
here; fortunately, we have the entire other half of the
grid. Start with “change world,” home of the caregiver
and activist and artist. Now is definitely the time to implement
your own peculiar creative service missions: to offer free online
music classes, or organize Zoom cocktail parties, or sew face
masks for healthcare workers. It’s an opportunity to learn
firsthand a truth of human life: giving is getting. The more
we help others, the more paradoxically fulfilled we become.
But our own efforts, however inspiring, are not the end of
the story. Contemplatives point to a final form of care that
doesn’t fit into our caffeinated model of Western activism. This
is the deep care of accepting the world, and by that I
mean a kind of listening. What is this moment trying to tell
us, to teach us? Can we be quiet and humble and respectful
enough to hear it? To really experience it? Or are we going to
cover over this sudden pause with more noise, even the noise
of our best intentions? Sometimes the real work is adapting
ourselves to the changing world, not forcing the world to
adapt to us. I’m not sure what this looks like, and that’s the
point. It won’t come from my agenda, or from yours.
The recognition that each quadrant has its place can be
liberating. It frees us from the “shoulds” imposed by our
internal judges, to say nothing of our culture’s. Even within
the four walls of our homes, there’s a time for rest and for
action, for accepting and appreciating things as they are,
and for deliberately working to change them. Rest and
acceptance restore our energy and our
wisdom; action and change express them.
They’re all part of a single dynamic of care.•
Jeffrey Warren is a Canadian author, meditation teacher,
and the founder of the Toronto-based meditation group
The Consciousness Explorers Club. jeffwarren.org
14 Read + hear more: www.silvergoldmagazine.ca