MIND MOVES:Survival will depend on merging our different perspectives, writes TONY BATES.
DESPITE LOOMING celebrations in Washington, DC next week and the good news story of a new era in America that will give many folk a reason to believe, this new year is proving to be tougher than expected.
Every day we are drip fed stories that suggest there are dark and deadly forces at work. We hear how cutbacks are impacting painfully on the lives of families and communities here, in between being showered with stories from the Middle East that horrify us.
Already 2009 seems to be turning into a year where cynics can wink their knowing eye at the dreamers and believers. We may have hoped for greater order and harmony in our lives, but it looks like self-interest, greed and vengeance are dictating our destiny on this planet.
The cynics are not completely wrong, but their version of reality is not the whole truth. They describe accurately what is happening in the external world, but they have very little to say about the capacity within human beings to reveal their greatest qualities in the face of adversity.
We are facing very challenging times. There are certain questions we need to answer as we face into the year ahead. How are we to cope with continual shocks in our lives and not be overwhelmed by them? To what extent are we helpless pawns in the global drama that is unfolding all around us? To what extent are we free to choose what we make of our lives, even when we are confronted by circumstances that are not of our own choosing?
There are at least two points of view on what makes us human: an objective “outside” view, where we can describe what’s happening, and the subjective “inside” view which is all about how we experience and react to what’s happening around us.
The cynics can sit back and be smug as long as they assume that objective reality dictates our subjective experience of that reality. But if you reject their premise, which I do, then you see that as people, we are free to choose how we react and to find meaning in our lives, even when the odds are stacked against us.
These are big questions and I wish I could answer them definitively and impart some deep level of inner confidence in you the reader, that you can make it through the year. But it’s not that simple. It will take many newspaper columns and a lot of honest dialogue between all of us to explore these issues in the year ahead. Survival will depend on merging a number of different perspectives – we will need philosophy to help us to frame some of these issues and to help us find meaning in our lives, particularly in its darker moments. And we need psychology to help us to apply this wisdom in practical ways so we can turn our values and our vision into our everyday living.
Philosophy’s gift is to help us to see value and meaning in our lives even when everything around us is falling apart; psychology’s gift is to help us to find the strength and the means within ourselves to face adversity and not be overwhelmed by it.
A practical example would be an everyday problem-solving technique that could save you from sinking into complete despair when you look at all the things that remain undone in your life. For want of a better phrase I am calling this technique “reducing what terrifies you to manageable bite-sized problems you can solve”. Here’s how it goes: You can look at the world as being so full of uncertainty and terrifying possibilities that it all seems too much. Or you can do yourself a big favour and write down a specific “finite” series of problems that you can do something about today.
So, for example, I began this column with a sense of being overwhelmed by the infinite number of things that could go wrong and the impossibility of capturing in this short space what you the reader need to do to keep your head together. I wasn’t wrong in identifying the enormous scope of the challenge to all of us, but I was wrong in trying to solve our conundrum in one shot.
This feeling of being “overwhelmed” should be your warning light in the year ahead. That you see it as a sign that you may be asking more of yourself than is possible and that it’s time to focus on discreet problems you can actually do something about.
For a change, I took my own advice: in this column, I gave up trying to write the Obama-esque equivalent of how to protect your mental health in the year ahead, and settled for: 1) naming some of the questions we will explore in the year ahead, 2) giving myself a realistic timeframe within which we can address these questions, and 3) offering you a humble antidote to feeling overwhelmed, which hopefully will be the first of a series of helpful suggestions for how to survive life without letting it break you.
- Tony Bates is founding director of Headstrong – The National Centre for Youth Mental Health (www.headstrong.ie)