1. When the world seems to be falling apart
The Rewired for Good podcast | Episode 1 | 1 October 2024
Notes
Against a background of conflict escalations and continued violations of international (humanitarian) law, this episode focuses on how to deal with grief, hopelessness and helplessness. It offers four concrete ways to step out of despair and continue to be a force of positive change in the world.
Transcript
Hi, dear, dear aid workers. Tough times we're going through. I know a lot of you are grief stricken right now.
Not going to lie, it's knocked me down a couple times. A lot of what we believe in seems to be of no help lately. humanitarian law, principles, human rights, declarations, treaties, agreements, humanity, compassion. It's all so flimsy these days. I decided to record this podcast to offer some ideas on how to best get through this as individuals, but also as a community of global helpers. I always imagined this podcast would start with a more uplifting and positive note, but life stood a bit in the way of me launching this two years ago like I wanted to.
My personal fears took over and here we are. And I no longer feel like it's acceptable to remain silent and hide. So here goes nothing. I'm going to try to help any way I can. And I've decided to start with this topic or this question of what to do when the world seems to fall apart as it does a little bit these days. For me, there are four things that I want to offer you.
The first one is to lean into whatever grief you're feeling. A lot of times, I feel like we want to escape this type of negative emotion with distractions, with over-drinking, with over-eating, scrolling through social platforms more than we'd like to. We kind of want to numb the pain down. And of course, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. It's not like I'm condemning it. I realize a lot of it is often doubled with feelings of guilt, survivor's guilt, of insufficiency for not being able to do enough to save lives, anger at decision makers, at the world, at history, you name it. There seems to be no shortage of things to blame for how awful things have become. So really it's crappy feelings all around.
And of course the natural thing is to want to turn the dial down on it, to numb it down and to escape it. And while there's no judgment, of course, for me on handling it that way, I think it's a risky way to handle grief because first, it can come out with a vengeance. You'll have these grief explosions out of control when you don't want them to come out.
Recently, I came back from a difficult war zone to a more relaxed duty station, and frequently, I found myself having to leave meetings because even though I was trying to give space to all the pain that I was going through, it was not enough and it became so intolerable that I really, really could not be in the office, to be honest. I call that the unbearable lightness of living and leaving.
The second reason why I think numbing it down may not be the most recommendable way to handle it is because if these days, like me, with everything that's going on, you feel grief, sadness, defeat, anger, you feel, I don't know, a deep sense of injustice, you feel destabilized because you're watching everything you think you know be wrong, I want to highlight the appropriateness of what you're going through. There is no scenario in which I personally would want to watch first-hand civilians suffer tremendously in this world that kinda, shoulda, by now have gotten past this kind of suffering and not feel heartbroken.
And I'm actually extremely grateful to be finding it intolerable to be fine, to be fine with my privilege. And if you're listening to this, and you're both a humanitarian worker and a person directly affected by the crisis in your country, obviously, your grief, your pain should not be something that you try to negotiate with.
It's there for a reason. And I think seeing it, sitting with it, carrying it like a heavy piece of luggage, we aid workers are pretty familiar with dragging heavy pieces of luggage across our lives. Seeing that grief and treating it as something that is naturally there, heavy, naturally accompanying us through these difficult times will make it all much more manageable and tolerable. So that's the first recommendation. Hold space for your grief, lean into it, spend time with it, don't try to run away from it necessarily all the time.
The second thing is to invite you to not give into all black or white thinking. For obvious survival reasons, when our nervous systems are triggered, it's very hard for the brain to start seeing things with subtlety and with all their shades of gray. And we need to simplify the world when things get tough, because otherwise we can't act in a way that keeps us alive. So right now, for a lot of us, it's easy to see the world as not making sense. It's easy to see everything that we built and worked for through civilizations and centuries to amount to nothing. All humanity has been lost. I certainly have gone and continue to go through phases of total hopelessness.
But one thing that is very important to remember is that it's not true. It's just not true. The world remains full of beauty and miracles, helpers, people fighting very hard for the right thing at the local level, at the national level, at the global level.
And then the second thing is, of course, it's not helpful. It's a perception mistake. The world is not bad. It's not good. It just is. It has always been and is and will continue to be both full of bad, full of good, full of darkness, full of light, full of people who destroy, full of people who rebuild. And so I want to invite you to not shut down to the beauty that continues to prevail amid all of the darkness.
My third recommendation is that you take care of yourself. And I know that this sounds super obvious, but I coach a lot of aid workers who when the going gets tough, kind of start neglecting their own needs. We continue to have, in this sector, very cowboy attitudes in approaching the hardships that we put ourselves through.
I want to make it very clear that when I say taking care of yourself, I don't mean binge watching TV shows, I don't mean eating a bunch of chocolates and getting massages. Those are wonderful things, of course, and they have the merit of calming your nervous system down. If you have access to that kind of stuff, go for it.
But what I really mean with taking care of yourself is that you take the time to thoughtfully give your body, your mind, your heart, the things that they need. And some examples of that would be to get enough sleep, to eat nutritious food, to read constructive things, to call a friend and talk about the stuff that hurts you, connect with any version of spirituality that you've chosen to practice in your life.
Clarifying what your values are, for example, and staying out of people pleasing so you can be honest with yourself and with other people are very important ways of taking care of yourself in these pretty shaky times.
And then finally, the last recommendation I want to make is that you look for ways to step out of helplessness. It is not uncommon in the face of what the world is going through to hear the sentence, there's nothing we can do, what can we do, all humanity's lost, et cetera.
I want to say that the world needs us to think clearly and constructively and with determination now more than ever. And so rather than telling ourselves that there's nothing we can do, I want us to ask good questions to ourselves.
How can I make this one person's life better today, for example, or in these crappy times, who do I actually want to be? How can I add value in this chaos? You know, maybe we can't make politicians agree to sign ceasefires or to let aid reach people who need it, but how can I be a force of light anyway? There's this quote from Rumi that I really love, which is, if everything around you seems dark. Look again, you may be the light. So that's my invitation for us to move from reacting to responding, which is what we do best.
We are responders, but I'm seeing these days that for a lot of us it's getting really hard and I am first in line when I say this, but this is not the time to give up on our values. We have to hold space and re-decide to double down on our values, to re-decide consciously who we want to be in this particular time in history, join forces with other people of love, other people of light, and re-decide how we want to show up day in, day out, for humanity.
For some of you, it'll look like giving grace to that colleague who snapped at you. For others, it will be speaking up against injustice relentlessly on social media. For others, it will simply be continuing to do the work quietly for that crisis that has fallen into oblivion. And for someone else, it'll be donating money to some GoFundMe campaign.
There are a million ways to be a force of good in these dark times and to not fall into helplessness. So find the one way that works for you and don't skip a day. Don't skip a day of adding your piece to the edifice of good.
That's it. That's what I've got for you for these times when it seems that the world is falling apart and for those moments when grief takes over in unbearable ways. Make space for the pain, let it be painful. Second, don't give into the idea that everything is awful, it just isn't true. Three, take very good care of yourself by feeding your body, your heart, your mind with what they actually need, not what they crave. And four, don't fall into helplessness, don't stay there, go be the force of good that you are.
I want to finish this episode by sending loads of love and courage to anyone currently in Lebanon, Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine. These are such tough times. If you've lost people dear to you, as I have, my heart goes out to you. And to everyone working in forgotten, neglected crises that are completely eclipsed by the coverage given to those four other big emergencies, you're all doing incredibly necessary work.
Keep at it.
I'll see you next week.