Embracing Totality

How to stop worrying and say yes to whatever comes next.

Eclipse (1966) by Dorothea Tanning

“Kierkegaard, in Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing, describes complete absorption in God as the deepest unity in life. All ambivalence would disappear and competing interests would be reconciled.” — Erving and Miriam Polster, Gestalt Therapy Integrated

Last night I read these words in a hotel room in Dayton, Ohio. My sister was in the queen bed next to mine, reading a witty and suspenseful seafaring novel that I’m pretty sure she’s read a few times before. My mother was at an Airbnb a few miles away with two of her lifelong friends, probably telling each other the same stories they’ve repeated for years now.  

We’re all in town to see the total eclipse.

I don’t care that much about eclipses. I wouldn’t personally choose to drive 16 hours round-trip just to watch the world go dark for a few minutes. I said yes because it seemed important to say yes. My sister was also on the fence, but she decided it was important, too.

So now we’re in Ohio. Unfortunately, the clouds might be a problem. This morning I woke up at 5 am to look at the weather forecast on three different apps. I read some pretty damning reviews of the “castle” one hour north of Dayton where my mom and her friends want to watch the eclipse. Those ladies might be hard to dissuade. Last night, they seemed determined to pack sandwiches and leave early and drive in traffic for an hour, just to sit in an open field next to a collapsing, leaky castle and a few porta potties.

So I’m starting to worry. I’m sending screenshots of cloud coverage to my mother, but I keep getting little red NOT DELIVERED messages back each time.

Finally, I decide to get my running clothes out of the car, so I can go for a run and maybe calm down. Yesterday my sister and I ran ten miles along the Miami River. Today’s run will be shorter but maybe it will help.

On the way through the hotel parking lot, I see a sign on a rearview mirror that says:

PRAY LESS, WORRY MORE.

Right on. I think. Couldn’t agree more!

Then I look again. I misread it. It actually says:

PRAY MORE, WORRY LESS.

***

Sometimes I treat ambivalence and worry as a kind of religion. “If I worry enough about this turbulence,  this plane won’t crash.” “If I research the weather enough, we’ll find the perfect spot to watch the eclipse.” “If I indulge my ambivalence about every person, place, and thing I encounter, I’ll sort through all of my conflicting feelings enough to understand myself completely.”

Ironically, I was reading Gestalt Therapy Integrated last night because I’ve been trying to evaluate my Gestalt-trained therapist’s approach — instead of, you know, just showing up to therapy and talking about my feelings like a normal person. So when I landed on those sentences about Kierkegaard and “complete absorption in God,” I found myself taking a deep breath.

Isn’t that the real point of being alive? I thought. Not to analyze and overthink everything, but to allow yourself to be utterly consumed by the divine.

Non-believers like me see the word pray and we think it means “Ask some imaginary man in the sky for favors.” So we take “Pray more, worry less,” to mean “Get the big bossman upstairs to give you what you want like I did, and then maybe you won’t be such a stress case!”

But when you think of prayer as fostering a deep connection with everything that’s divine — which for me includes the natural world and other people and animals and all of the strange, invisible forces that you can sense without understanding them completely — those words change.

PRAY MORE, WORRY LESS

means

Turn down your neurotic thoughts and attune yourself to the real magic around you.

***

That’s what this eclipse trip is really about.

My mom started planning it more than a year ago. I was always on the fence. Nothing about her plans sounded that great. I had my doubts about the hotel she booked. I kept picturing unwanted clouds and hours of gridlock.

But there are times when indulging your doubts gets you nowhere. Ambivalence is just another form of hiding in plain sight, a way of keeping yourself safe from everything you can’t control. Sometimes worrying is just another defense mechanism, a method of shielding yourself from disappointment, a strategy for remaining untouched by the unknown.

Prayer pays homage to the unknown. Praying is a way of saying yes to what’s important, a way of going hours out of your way to honor someone else’s wishes, a way of clearing space for magic to enter your life.

Praying is letting the outside world under your skin. Today’s eclipse — partial or total, clouds or no clouds — offers a chance for us to do that, to drop everything and walk outside and attune ourselves to the natural world and the people around us. Try to treat it as a kind of prayer — like reading the same seafaring novel again and again, like repeating the same childhood stories to your lifelong friends, like running for miles along a wide, muddy river, like saying yes without knowing what you’re saying yes to.

It feels good to say YES! without a single hint of NO! in your voice, even when you don’t know why you’re doing it. It feels good to align yourself with the divine, even when you don’t always know what that means. All ambivalence disappears, and competing interests are reconciled.

Suddenly you realize that you don’t have to know more. In fact, accepting that you’ll never know enough is a way of yielding yourself to the enchantment of the universe.

So today, turn down the noise and the worries and pray to what you don’t know. Pray to the darkening sky and the encroaching clouds. Pray to the old ladies chattering about colanders and castles, pin holes and packed sandwiches. Surrender to the real magic around you.

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Thanks for reading Ask Polly! Get some eclipse glasses, go outside, and let the world in.