I get up sometimes these days – scan the news headlines, how could I not? – and think about the art of facing things without shutting down or hiding or running away.

I do it this way: I don’t turn away from the world, or my own mistakes in the world, I am learning to face whatever the universe brings me, I lean into it and swim upstream, just like the fabled Salmon.

Just as I had to learn to accept and acknowledge the worst parts of me, I agree and acknowledge the worst parts of the world beyond me. The one has taught me to deal with the other.

That leaves room for the good parts of living.

Figuring out how to do some good in the world has also been a miraculous boon for me. It is both grounding and healing, giving me the chance to rebuild at least a part of my troubled identity.

Robert Bly, the poet and founder of the doomed so-called men’s movement, wrote something that appealed to me then and now:

“If you had a sad childhood, so what? You can dance with only one leg and see the snowflake falling with only one eye.”

I see the world bubbling and boiling with one leg and one eye, but I can see it.

Leaning into the experiences moves me forward; it doesn’t shut me down or make me sad.

Every day, I’d rather practice the art of facing things then run away from what the news brings me, that would be a psychic beating. I  don’t wish to take.

This is the world I live in and love, there is no hiding from it, from nasty politicians to viral pandemics.

I just do a visual thing in my head, I lean into it, put it in my imaginary cup, and keep it right there. I don’t take it inside of me.

I have learned in recent years that this is the experience of being challenged and revealed.

I do this through a willingness to be vulnerable that will enable me to experience grace, which is the art of facing things, in the world outside and the world inside.

It was only when I learned the art of facing things about myself that I began to learn how not to be swept away by what the day brings. I can’t control them, but I am the commander of me.

I let what disturbs and frightens me go right through me. That is what leaning into it means. That is, for me, the art of facing things.

This, too, shall pass, all of it.

(Photo, my granddaughter Robin walking along the concrete rim in the center of the Bronx Zoo).