This track includes ten minutes of meditation practice; if that feels like a lot to you, maybe start at the beginning
Turn on the TV, get comfy, and play this track after you’ve watched the episode: Mystery Train (Season Two, Episode Nineteen).
P.S. If you’re curious, here you can find out why I started this project.
Recording Transcript (Meditation Begins at 6:16)
Hello again, adventurer!
And it is good to be with you. “I’ve got a surprise for you!” And the surprise is that I’m gonna start replacing all the people in your surrounding environment with skeletons, so geeet readyyyyy.
I mean, what to Finn is a dream birthday party would be, to be me, something of a nightmare scenario. Not to shit on murder mystery parties; they can be quite a delight. But it helps me to at least to know what I’m signing up for. Finn seems to integrate the reality of death with astounding ease, with his first thought after looking at a new skeleton being “see? I know it wasn’t him.”
But I do hope that you are surrounded by people in your life who are willing to conspire on your behalf, who know the things you want in immense specificity and are willing to give it to you. You deserve relationships of care like that. We all do.
Which is to say: I hope you have friends who are willing to give you whatever your equivalent of a murder mystery train is.
I love this ending, and even having seen it many times, I can’t decide if I think that Jake is lying about the jello or not. Frankly either seems possible and consistent with his character. And maybe it doesn’t matter. maybe love can include hatching plans that risk your friend “dying horribly.” Again, not really my speed. But it seems to work for Finn and Jake.
But for real, behind this very amusing episode about a train mystery, I do think we can observe a lot about the care that Finn and Jake have for each other. Jake’s patience with Finn’s utter incompetence and inability to solve the damn mystery, letting children paint him, and adjusting his character to try to give Finn a clue, the “elaborate set up for [his] birthday.” These are all ways of expressing thoughtfulness, time and attention, in communicating care.
Care is something that ultimately does have to be communicated, actively in the world, in order for people to feel it, and for us to shape the world into a more caring place. I don’t think that it is “enough” to privately care about things, to let your values simply be ideas and not bring them into reality in the world with the unique body and mind you’ve been given.
But this is different than shaming ourselves for not being able to do it all, for valuing rest, or for having limits.
Practicing care is not about proving or earning your worth, it is about connecting with your own sense of worth, your inherent enough-ness, and then abundantly sharing it with others. Helping others to realize that they too are worthy of care.
If you are attentive to the world around you, and the beautiful friends and people and non-human creatures you encounter in your life, there will always be more things that are worthy of your care than you have the ability to meaningfully care for. And poorly communicating care, over-extending yourself, disregarding the care you need: none of these actually create a more caring world.
So it is a delicate balance. Between doing more to make a more caring world and extending care to yourself, or receiving it from others, and remembering that you alone do not have the power to change the whole world. And I have observed breakdown: in individual people, in relationships, and in community organization, when people cannot see that it is not all on them. It is not all about you. And you alone do not hold the vision for a better world, even though you do hold an indispensable part of it.
I think that meditation can give us the space to practice this balance. And even though there will be things that you care about in the world, things that are worthy of your care, that you will never be able to actualize or act upon, I do believe that it is still worth our time and energy to sit and reflect on what those things are. To grieve the things that are worthy of our care that we simply don’t have capacity to attend to. To dream of worlds of radical care where we do all support each other, and the planet, in ways that are delightful, pleasurable, and sustainable.
In the same way that we can be too far ahead or behind with our attention in meditation, we can also find moments in our life where we are caring too much, or not caring enough. Where we are controlling the actions of others, holding ourselves to unreasonable standards, and overcommitting, or where we have resigned ourselves to the way things are, given up on unique dreams that deserve our time, and could better support ourselves and our community by doing a little more.
This balance of care is hard as hell. And it’s a dynamic balance, like riding a bike. We tend to find that the balance has moved too far in one direction because we hit a limit. We overcorrect and fall and skin our knee. And even when we manage to find the balance, it feels like a back and forth movement - left and right - rather than some perfectly still unmoving point.
I sure as hell don’t have this balance “worked out;” I haven’t solved the mystery. It’s something I struggle with consistently, especially as the problems of our world constantly change, and the list of things worthy of our care seems to grow.
But I also think this is an opportunity for us to reflect within ourselves about what we care about, and to connect with it more deeply. The train may be flying off the track, but maybe someone put a trampoline’s worth of jello at the bottom of the cliff. And we’ll never know who it was?
Maybe it’ll be you.
So “Climb aboard my train little boy. You’re my new friend.”
