Five Questions to Bolster Hope & Resilience
For many of us, the coming months (and years?) will likely feel daunting, draining, and tenuous. Here are 5 questions to buoy hope & seed resilience for ourselves, our communities, and those we love.
What does my ideal day look like?
When you ask yourself this question, I want you to imagine in great detail how your day would unfold from start to finish. Plan to write this down. Do you wake up gently and luxuriate with a book, or do you spring out of bed and get straight to it? What do you eat and drink for breakfast? What are the things you do between breakfast and lunch? What do you have for lunch? (Please forgive my meal-to-meal hobbit thinking.) Who do you spend time with, and how? What music do you listen to? Do you take a bath or shower? Do you spend time outside?
After you write down your ideal day in great detail, highlight or circle keywords that call out the essential elements of this ideal day.
Now, turn those essential elements into a quick-reference list that you can put somewhere visible - maybe on your refrigerator, bathroom mirror, or desk.
Having this list close at hand will help with delicious forms of behavioral activation to buoy your spirits when a day feels especially dark.
For me, this list includes: waking up gently and enjoying coffee in bed with my husband, followed by one of his amazing turmeric-feta omelettes for breakfast; doing my morning ritual of meditating and then reading a chapter or so from my current book; working on a painting or a print; writing; walking outside, usually a circuit around our yard and woods and maybe into the town forest…the list goes on. The longer it is, the better - you may need a very rich store of ideal moments.One of my favorite ideal-day rituals: a homemade matcha oat milk latte with a generous drip of pure Vermont maple syrup. What was the last thing I heard, watched, or read that made me laugh out loud?
Whatever it was, stock up on it - preferably in a way that can’t be taken from you in the event of a grid outage, app shutdown, etc. Laughter is a such a powerful tool of resistance. Silliness and joy are a light that is hard to extinguish.This is what (part of) sustainable resistance looks like. What is something I engage in that makes me lose all track of time?
I once heard it said that whatever you do while procrastinating is something you should do for the rest of your life. For me, it’s making art, and also writing. I can disappear for hours while working on a copper etching, a painting, an opinion piece, a poem…and it feels like I’ve only been at it for minutes. These cup-filling activities that magnetize us into a flow state are a key part of what make us human - they’re an essential element of what makes life worth living. Whatever these activities are for you, make sure you’re stocked up on the materials you need to do the activities, especially since many of these things will become more expensive in the coming months (I hope I’m wrong about that…but I don’t think I am).
What puts you in a flow state? For me, it’s art and writing. Also baking. Whatever it is, honor it and do it often. It’s a proactive tonic against despair. What is one skill you’ve always wanted to learn but have never made time for?
Maybe you’ve always wanted to learn to mend clothing. Maybe you’ve been thinking about starting a sourdough baking habit, but you didn’t make it happen during the COVID pandemic like your friends did. Perhaps you’ve been thinking about how useful it would be to know wilderness medicine, since you love to hike or camp with friends. Maybe you’ve always wanted to learn woodblock printmaking, or how to carve spoons, or how to be good at fishing. NOW is the time to start learning this new skill, whatever it is. Why? Because it’s not just good to have the new skill - it’s the learning it that’s important. When we learn new things and apply them to our own benefit, our brains get healthy doses of dopamine. Learning new skills also helps us feel like we’re experiencing growth and improvement - a powerful balm against the aura of regression.We camp and hike fairly often, so I’ve been planning to re-up my Wilderness First Responder certification. Learning new skills (and keeping them sharp) is a great strategy for home-growing your own dopamine and consistently growing as a human. What is something I have to offer to members of my community in a way that builds mutual resilience through connection, joy, and growth?
This could refer to your geographic community, your professional community, your creative community, etc. - any group you belong to with whom you share a mutual interest in betterment for both personal and common good. Maybe you’re a musician and you can host community sings or pickin’ circles at your home. Maybe you’re a writer who can guide workshops on writing poetry about grief or short stories about moments that restored folks’ faith in humanity. Maybe you’re an artist who can organize live drawing or plein air painting in nature. Maybe you’re a board game enthusiast who can organize community game nights. Whatever it is, don’t doubt the power and joy that creativity and play - especially when shared - can bring to your daily life.Themed book clubs, writing workshops, music circles, hiking groups, plein air painting clubs, board game nights…all of these are fun, relatively low-investment ways to build friendships and strengthen collective community resilience.
As you savor these questions of hope and resistance this weekend, please consider: what are strategies that I can start enacting *today* in my community to proactively lay foundations for collective resilience and hope *before* times get dark? Don’t discount the importance of scaffolding these supports before you actually need them…because by the time you really need them, you may no longer have the emotional bandwidth to get over the startup hump. Besides, these strategies don’t just pull you out of the dark - they also fend it off before it arrives.
Happy Thursday and happy weekend, all. Keep your light burning - the sum of individual lights can light the way for us all.
Warmly,
Jack