My election day game plan

disconnect from screens and engage in embodied community

There’s a presidential election tomorrow. You probably know this. It seems as though everyone is either yelling at other people online or holding their breath. There’s collective apprehension and fear that’s been ramping up for weeks.

Tonight, I am attending a well-timed house show by Andy Squyres. It’s a few minutes from my house, in the home of people I know but don’t see often enough. I’ll spend later Tuesday evening in the last meeting of our Emotionally Healthy Spirituality group.¹ A family friend will join us for dinner before that. That’s my plan for not obsessing over what might happen.² It’s all the unknown about the whole thing that bothers me.  

But it’s not just the election, is it? My dog is very sick and probably dying. There’s uncertainty in a part of my life that hums in the background all the time. It’s easy to be swept up in fears, concerns about the future, the endless ways to ask “what if.” The future is unknown and the unknown is (mostly) scary.³ 

I don’t have a magic fix. I can’t heal everyone’s anxiety.⁴ I can’t change the real threats of grief and loss that we all face. But there is one reminder that I keep circling back to: I only need to manage today.⁵  

I’m a future-oriented person.⁶ I realize not everyone is. Emily P. Freeman, for example, is a great example of someone who is past-oriented. Her work has taught me reflection and examination skills. Each of us are oriented to time in some way; we more easily live in the past, the present, or the future. For me, it’s the future and the future is a scary place. I am constantly reminding myself that, while I need to plan for the future in the limited ways that I can, I do not need to live there. That will tie me up in non-reality, in something that I have made up, and make it impossible for me to see today. I will not be able to be present to the work and the life in front of me if I am obsessing over what might go wrong in the work and life ahead of me. 

I don’t have to solve all the problems of the future. I don’t have to answer all the questions that I have about parenting a kid with disabilities.⁷ I do need to parent that child today. I don’t have to solve every problem that might exist depending on who is elected president. I have to engage faithfully with the world today. I don’t have to know how long my dog is going to live. I can enjoy her presence today and take the best care of her that I can. The things that I don’t have to do are things that I cannot do anyway. It is raging illusion that lets me think I have any control over those things. Nevertheless, I can sit and fixate on those things and completely miss where I do have agency and I can do something. 

• Today, what is being given to me? 

• Today, what is being asked of me? 

• Today, in what ways am I a signpost of the kingdom of God? 

This is how I want to spend my energy. I don’t want my fears of the future to drain my capacity for today.  

Andy Crouch probably wins my quote of the year award.⁸ In The Life We’re Looking For, he wrote, “The defining emotional challenge of our time is anxiety, the fear of what might be instead of the courageous pursuit of what could be.” I want to courageously go after what could be. It’s one of the things that I want to remember when I look at the tattoo on my arm and see “eshet chayil” which means “woman of valor.” I want to courageously move toward something today, not just fear something coming toward me from the future. 

So here’s to being on the internet as little as possible this week and being in my imagined future less and less.⁹ If you have a game plan for the election, I’d love to hear about it!

1. The last meeting until after the holidays anyway

2. Will that go off the rails if something dramatic happens? Possibly. But I’m going to try to be as screen free as possible.

3. For some of us, at least.

4. My therapist kindly pointed that anxiety has a job; you just can’t let it get carried away.

5. I often feel a little like a vulture with certain basic concepts. I circle around and around them because otherwise I forget and lose my way.

6. This is, after all, how I get from to a vision of 80-year-old me to working backward to what I do today. It’s not all bad. In fact, some of it is really good. What’s I’m writing about here derails me.

7. Though we are doing practical stuff like a special needs trust and waivers and all that.

8. It’s a new award. Don’t ask who has won it before.

9. If you’re curious about how I engage with the news, I wrote about that one time!