Why I Ain’t Afraid of No Ghosts

“Don’t go out of your house or talk to your neighbor, or else you could die!” This seems to be the mood of the day. It’s a mood worth investigating, because we are taught to be deathly afraid of death.

Last week I was reading a political strategy book for progressives by the eloquent Berkeley linguist, George Lakoff. He reminded me we view the world through frames.

Frames are our mental and emotional biases, cultural biases, familial biases, that we have picked up along the way that color our world view, or understanding of what’s what in the world. We often don’t let such boring things as facts get in the way or overrule our personal frames.

For example, for some people reading this I’m already a foreigner, someone outside their comfortable frames, just because I was reading a progressive political strategy book by a linguist from Berkeley. “Progressive, Berkeley, Linguist,” all trip off particular life frames with which  some people are comfortable, others reject.

Be that as it may, it was Lakoff who led me to be thinking about “frames”  when I realized I was viewing  this very new, unprecedented social phenomenon—the so-called global Corona Virus Pandemic  (hereafter, CVP) and the institutional response to this potential virus—with my old frames, frames I had picked up along the way that were—are—not particularly useful for viewing the CVP phenomenon for what it actually is.

My life experience (boomer from the 60’s) has led me to mostly distrust and resist all manner of authority. I tend to put my faith in friends and community. Further, and more radical, I tend to have a somewhat metaphysical approach to health and healing. (“Fear is the fundamental toxin. Love the fundamental antidote.”)

Over the last week or two I’ve discovered that few of these frames are particularly helpful in understanding, let alone relating to this quite unique and unprecedented CVP phenomenon. I’ve been feeling out of sorts with my frames, so I went looking for a new, more accurate frame.

This morning, reading a book about Christian Hermeticism (alas, again, such reading suddenly casts me outside the comfort frames of many of my friends and associates) I was graced with a new – at least to me–“frame” by which to view this  CVP anomaly.

In a nutshell, I saw that the CVP has us all looking old man death straight in the eye. And this morning’s reading suggested to me that death relies on “the principle of subtraction.” Quite simply, when someone—or some thing—dies, they are “subtracted” from our immediate experience. Duh.

Life, on the other hand, relies on the principle of addition. When a baby is born, something—someone—is added to our immediate experience.

Although (trust me) we are not all going to die from the CVP (and rest in peace to those who do), we are all currently experiencing mass subtraction. The stock market, for example, has subtracted nearly half of its bulk. We have subtracted our schooling, subtracted our mass sporting events, subtracted our church services, subtracted much of our traveling, subtracted our yoga classes and scrabble pot-lucks.

We are experiencing mass, multi-level subtraction! How interesting. How curious. Most of us have never before experienced such mass subtraction—down to the subtraction of toilet paper from the grocery shelves! We are, especially here in America, so much more accustomed to more, more, more, add, add, add. Now we are experiencing forced subtraction! Again, how curious, how fun. We are not used to this. 

The question, of course, is how might we best respond to this mass subtraction, once we recognize what it actually is? We each respond to such subtraction in our own way, of course (just as we all grieve in our own way.) But it seems a wise “balancing” act to simply add something, large or small, when and where we can.

For example, yesterday my young neighbor rang our doorbell and asked if we (old folks that we are) needed anything from the grocery store. How thoughtful and caring. I pointed out that we old folks had just flown across the country, twice, in the past ten days, with all the airports, cafes, crowded lines that such entails. But thanks, young friend, for adding something nice—adding a piece of good will, good life–  to our day.

And that’s what is called for now.  We are called to add a piece of life, if only a joke, or a couple of roles of toilet paper, or even a short essay, to our neighbor’s experience, to help balance the mass subtraction now going on.

I personally have the basic frame that addition—the life principle—is a hundred, a thousand times more powerful than the subtraction (death) principle.   In fact, the latest research, added to hundreds of years of documentation, posits: bottom line, there is no death. When we drop this physical body, so research suggests, the wondrous circus continues, both for those of us left behind and for those of us who have gone on ahead.

Or at least, that’s my frame these days, and why I ain’t afraid of no ghosts. (That ghost is just Grandpa Willy, playing a joke. Adding in his two cents!)

Hope this new frame—we are experiencing mass subtraction—might be helpful for some. Additional insights may be forthcoming.