The ways we talk and don’t talk about covid are similar in kind to the ways we talk and don’t talk interpersonally. This fact is as painful in all important interpersonal relationships as it is painful on a national and global scale concerning covid.
Interpersonally, it is extremely difficult for almost all people to examine psycholinguistically important moments in real-time if they have not been trained or self-taught. Similarly, it is extremely difficult for almost all people to examine almost any aspect of covid if they do not share mostly the same conclusions.
Psychologically humans exist on a spectrum that grades from the unique microscopic moments of unique individual experience to the macroscopic landscape shared by many individuals belonging to a psychological collective. Just as a psychological collective can be created (or discovered) by naming it so individual moments can be defined by individuals naming them, often incorrectly.
Unique individual moments can also be predefined by a psychological collective. Many individuals perceive human life to be precisely that, something defined by a collective. It is very difficult for many individuals to see this and almost impossible for most individuals to be able to talk about this in real-time, real-world situations that are psychologically stressful and thus also psychologically important.
If you lament the disaster of our national covid dueling monologues, stop and consider that your important individual interpersonal relationships suffer similar problems. Dueling monologues arise when microscopic dialogues do not happen, which they rarely do anywhere in the world throughout all history. This problem is big and small, ecompassing the size of individual lives and entire human epochs. It is founded on the psycholinguistic difficulty of talking about talking as it is happening without being distracted by habits, customs, manners.
When talking about talking as it is happening happens, almost everyone becomes confused or angry or dismayed. You have to see this problem. Then figure out how to deal with it. You can do this in your own way (please report back to me if you are successful). Or you can do it through FIML practice which is described in many posts on this site. If you can see what FIML corrects, then the basic description of how to do FIML will be easy to understand. If you can do basic FIML many times, you will share a fundamental skill with your partner that will make your lives much better.
If FIML looks easy but you can’t do it, you probably don’t understand it. If you think you already are doing it, maybe but I doubt it. If you can’t make any sense of it, talk about it with your partner. Once you see what FIML is, you will love it because it frees you from a most basic and common form of human misunderstanding.
American Buddhist Net 