Living Inside the Pressure Cooker
“Open flap to release steam.”
I remember my college friend and I in side-splitting laughter, when we received our pizza delivery and saw these words printed on the corner of the pizza box. We were studying for our Physics final together and were pretty stressed out about the work in front of us. “If only it were that easy,” we said to each other.
31 years later, that simple instruction still intrigues me.
Since COVID-19 began, I have been searching for a metaphor that really captures the way this pandemic has changed my daily experience. My friends and I have talked about how each day brings a complex stew of emotions. Sheltering-in-place seems to turn the dial up on every feeling. The uncertainty, vulnerability, and grief we are facing nowadays disrupts the flow of family relationships, friendships, and work life.
Then it hit me: It feels like we are living inside a pressure cooker!
A pressure cooker shortens cooking time by trapping steam in a tightly enclosed space—increasing the temperature of (and reducing the energy needed to cook) the food. This is a benefit to us when we are pressed for time and the output is food.
It works against us when we are dealing with human relationships. To build and maintain healthy relationships, we need lots of time, space, and energy to balance our needs and emotional reactions to daily stressors with the wants and needs of others.
The Practice of Letting Go
In her book Welcoming the Unwelcome, Pema Chodron discusses how moments continuously are being born and dying. For example, you may not be happy with the quality of the interaction you had this morning with your child (or partner, or coworker), but that interaction ended. Moments or hours later, you find yourself with another opportunity to engage, and then another.
TRY THIS PRACTICE. It’s very simple.
Recollect an event or a moment from yesterday or earlier today.
Think about how this event or moment is gone forever…
Just keep doing this, over and over again. Do it whenever you think of it—when you wake up in the morning, when you can’t sleep at night, whenever it occurs to you.
If you keep up with this practice regularly, you’ll begin to get a feeling of stepping into the flow of impermanence. You’ll experience directly how nothing exists in a fixed way.
Birth and death, birth and death—they keep going on and on continually and eternally. As we become more accustomed to this flow, we start seeing things in a fresh way.
–Pema Chodron
