Tropical Zen

I’m trying *not* to think about actual politics today. I’m fearful of the result, whether stolen, tricked or legitimate. I’m already an anxious person with a shaky sense of hope; paying close attention to the news* and vote counts is not going to make it better. It’s all one great big anxiety-inducing show; the numbers will be the same whether I watch them or not.

This isn’t physics, where the observer effect will cause the election to be greatly altered by my singular addition to the millions of people already doing the observing. We could also see it as a thought paradox, like Schrödinger’s Cat . This was intended to point out the ridiculousness of quantum thought, but it’s still a very useful tool for seeing exactly how each version of quantum thought plays out.  I’m thinking that the same kind of ridiculousness is happening with the US presidential election–that Obama both is and is not President-Elect until we open the box (the Electoral College votes are tallied, and then the Supreme Court casts the only twleve that count) and that my anxiously watching the outside of the box won’t help either me or Obama.

I prefer to try to think about it from a zen perspective: there is no observer.
Now if only I could remember that all the time.

* “These findings demonstrate that watching the news on television triggers persisting negative psychological feelings that could not be buffered by attention-diverting distraction (i.e., lecture), but only by a directed psychological intervention such as progressive relaxation.”