Someone told me yesterday, “I feel like a tiger is chasing me and I’m just sitting on the couch.” I related to that. Deeply.
About six months ago I wrote an essay called Running From the Lion That Isn’t There. And the fact that I wrote that months ago, and then someone said something almost identical, at least in sentiment, yesterday means this is something that’s weighing on a lot of us right now.
Most of us are feeling a sense of danger lurking around every corner. Our Spidey senses are on full alert.
Why is that? I don’t think it needs to be spelled out. And honestly, spelling it out might just get a bitch disappeared. So rather than listing the constant daily traumas clearly contributing to this collective anxiety, let’s take a more hopeful turn. Let’s talk about finding hope in a hopeless situation.
If you’ve followed my musings over the years, you’ll know I’ve written a few times about Viktor Frankl; that amazingly enlightened soul who survived the camps of World War II.
He told stories of hope in the most hopeless situation imaginable. Stories of people who resisted the urge to surrender in the face of overwhelming doom. People whose faith steered them toward a relentless belief in the goodness of God when there was no other goodness to be found. He taught us that there is always hope; even when everything looks utterly hopeless.
It’s easy to let our self-preservation instincts run wild and rob us of joy. And I’m not saying we should silence those instincts entirely; they’ve kept our species alive for a very long time. But I am saying we should occasionally put those feelings, the ones screaming that danger is ahead, on the back burner for just a moment from time to time. In spite of the alarms going off in your head and in your gut, find tiny instances of beauty and happiness in your daily life.
Give yourself permission to push the silence button every now and then. Look at the sky. Smell the flowers. Delight in the laughter on your child’s face. The alarm will still be there, clanging away, but at least you’ll have taken a moment to soak in the deliriously wonderful goodness of being alive.
Because without those little moments, what’s left?
Join us in making the world a better place. You’ll be glad that you did.
Cheers, friends.