Now You Know
“The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you
Don’t go back to sleep”
Chances are you never realized that the hearts and minds of so many people were shriveled with hate and fear.
Now you know.
Chances are you never imagined that a sociopath, a crass buffoon, could so easily hijack that hatred and fear and transform it into such destructive, nihilistic and nakedly self-serving political power.
Now you know.
Chances are you never realized that the American democratic experiment was so fragile, so susceptible to destabilizing manipulation by bad foreign actors and ignorant, hateful domestic terrorists.
Now you know.
Chances are you hoped that people would, for the most part, act rationally and accept established science for the greater good of humankind and the future viability of the natural world upon which it depends.
Now you know.
Chances are that in your youth you imagined yourself invincible and thought that your body would remain healthy and vigorous and without blemish forever. Now you know.
The world is full of unpleasant, sometimes shocking surprises. We can't anticipate everything that could happen but we can prepare ourselves and train our minds to deal with them if they do.
Premeditatio malorum
As I've written elsewhere, imagining worst-case scenarios -- the premeditation of evils -- to better prepare us for an uncertain future goes back 2500 years, to the Greek and Roman Stoics, who believed that consciously meditating on the things we dread the most better prepared us to deal with their possible impacts. They didn't obsessively ruminate on all the terrible things that could happen to them, and they weren't willing to let the possibility of these things coming to pass paralyze them from living their lives. They were simply trading a little practical morbidity in the present in exchange for a bit of emotional future-proofing.
Avoid denial
Denying that something bad has happened -- a global pandemic or the takeover of the US government by fascist white supremacists or a cancer diagnosis -- prevents us from responding thoughtfully and taking the action necessary to integrate this new information into our lives to prepare to move forward into whatever the "next normal" looks like. Denial makes us hold onto the way things were, hoping that things will return to normal, and when they don't revert to our expectations we take things personally ("Why is this happening to me!?"). Taking things personally is not helpful; it distracts us from the work we need to undertake to adapt to changing circumstances.
Don't react emotionally
Humans are emotional animals; we feel things deeply, and our emotional weather is pretty much a constant feature in our lives, swirling around us at all times. This emotional richness is an essentially human feature; we can't, nor should we, try to turn our emotions off. But it's possible to feel your emotions without reacting to them, without letting them carry you off. Instead, you can take half a step back and observe them, without reacting, and decide how to respond to them. This takes practice, and the first step is to realize that you and your emotions are not one and the same, that your emotions are a response to something, a response that you can learn, with practice, to control.
Reframe everything as an opportunity
Coming to see everything that happens to you as an opportunity for learning and growth is the ultimate mental hack. But it's only possible if you've prepared yourself by countenancing unfortunate outcomes, moving quickly through paralyzing denial, and letting go of over-identifying with the emotions -- anger, fear, shame, guilt, self-pity -- that prevent you from adapting to changing circumstances that are often beyond your control. If it helps, you can remind yourself that the reward for adversity is almost always growth of some kind. As the poet Wendell Berry has so eloquently written, "the impeded stream is the one that sings."
Chances are you may have never realized that you could turn adversity into wisdom and challenge into opportunity.
Now you know.