The film adaptation of Stephen King’s book The Green Mile was released the week my first semester as a teacher drew to a close. That first semester, a roller coaster with a wobbly track, was as exhilarating as it was exhausting. I gave it my all, then I went to the movies.
By my account, The Green Mile is a modern classic. Even if you disagree, it certainly left an indelible mark on me. I often think about the character of John Coffey, a gentle giant wrongly imprisoned for a heinous crime. Brilliantly played by the late Michael Clarke Duncan, Coffey is a telepath, a healer of sorts, with the ability to exchange power and energy. He’s an empath of supernatural proportions.
After a week in England with my kid, which I wrote about last week (thank you dear readers: yes she’s a cutie and yes, it’s a Beauty and the Beast situation) we headed to the airport to suffer the indignities of flying the friendly skies.
Between my shame for indulging in leisure air travel despite its environmental impact and my guilt for my privileged life, I’m not one to grouse about how awful it is to fly these days.
I mean, it’s awful. Ryan Air is run by a thousand Nurse Ratcheds. But still.
Baby girl and I arrived at the airport with ample time to get corralled like cattle in line after line before being stuffed like sardines into a flying steel tube. Because we were there so early, I had little reason to be anxious. Nevertheless, I was desperately anxious. It makes no sense.
But it makes perfect sense. Airports breed a collective sense of anxiety that might only be rivaled by hospitals. We’re surrounded by strangers. We kowtow to authorities uniforms. It’s unpredictable. It’s out of our control. Someone here has Covid. The flight will be late. We’ll be late for the flight. The plane probably won’t crash, but…
No one is where they want to be. Everyone is in transit.
On top of the confluence of those universal anxieties, there are those anxieties specific to the traveler. Oftentimes people are flying to a conference or a business meeting or job interview. Births. Deaths. Reunions. Even in the case of leisure travel or family vacations, folks have much more on their minds than our little monkey brains were designed for.
So here we all are, lined up, in limbo, desperately anxious about what is and what is to come. Tempting fate. Hoping to fly away from something.
My dear friend Benjamin, once my podcast guest for whom I wrote this song, lent me Rebecca Solnit’s, Wanderlust: A History of Walking. She shares a parable about a Zen master for whom, before his studies, “mountains were only mountains, but during his studies mountains were no longer mountains, and afterward mountains were again mountains.” This speaks to the perpetual paradox that when we are closest to our destination we are also the farthest away.
So there we were, cuing, penned in like jackasses in a hailstorm, feeling the fear and the frustration of our fellow travelers, embracing their irritability and anxiety. Just chewing on their bad vibes like vile cud. Just being there.
Incidentally, the Peter Sellers movie Being There also had a profound and lasting impact on me.
And in that seemingly interminable line, as I physically and emotionally imbibed the anxiousness of my fellow travelers, I told my daughter about John Coffey. How he wore the weight of the world on his shoulders. How he carried our collective burdens. How he could suck the venom from collective existence and spew a swarm of flies.
While I am hardly a messianic, telepathic, empath in the mold of the supernatural John Coffey character, my daughter and I are certainly empaths. Of course, empathy exists on a spectrum, and individuals vary in the degree to which they exhibit empathic traits. I’m not sure I can tell you where I am on the spectrum. But I feel certain that I am on one side of it.
While high empathy can be a positive trait, it can also be emotionally taxing, leading to feelings of being overwhelmed and emotionally exhausted in spaces like airports and hospitals and funeral homes. Why did I feel so desperately anxious despite no particular fear of flying and despite having ample time to board the flight? Part of it, I told her, was empathy. Feeling the angst of others. Caring for their well being. I was unconsciously breathing in their travel frustrations and anxieties. But, unlike John Coffey, I had no swarm of flies to spew. No outlet at that moment, stuck in line, to release that energy.
But talking about it with her at that very moment was some kind of release. It was another reminder that empaths need to practice self-care, set boundaries, and have a language to avoid becoming overwhelmed by the emotions of others.
So we discussed the problem of what it feels like to have empathy in an acute and collective stressful moment. We also discussed the problem and the promise of social mirroring. Mirroring behavior is a psychological phenomenon where we imitate the actions, gestures, expressions, and speech patterns of people around us. You know about this. Like how we are more likely to yawn when someone around us does, even if we are unaware of their yawn. Or unconsciously walking in sync with a pal or a partner. Or crossing your legs when someone next to you does. Right? You know.
More empathic people, and my daughter is more empathic than me, mirror more. There is a promise and a peril to mirroring. Airports are perilous.
So I was thinking a lot this week about empathy and mirroring in real world situations where a tendency towards empathy can make it hard to breathe.
And I was thinking about how empathy in digital spaces can make it hard to breathe.
And I’ve been wondering why we, why I, despite the emotional impact, choose to participate in those digital spaces.
But mostly I’ve been thinking about John Coffey. How he chose to be fully present and to fully feel the world around him, even though his world was a prison. How he inhaled the pain and the anxiety of others. How he wore it.
And I’ve been thinking about Chance the gardener in Being There, for whom there is no desperate anxiety about what was, what is, and what is to come. There is no past and there is no future. There is now.
Yours,
D
I’m learning how rituals that mark time matter to me. So this year, I am carving out an hour or so on Friday to sit quietly before my family wakes to write about what I obsessed about that week. If you enjoy this weekly reflection, please subscribe so I can send it to you every Friday.