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Resilience
Curating What Fills Your Mind Can Shape Your Resilience
Personal Perspective: Filter out the darkness and let in the light.
Posted December 19, 2023 Reviewed by Ray Parker
Key points
- Here are four key strategies for maintaining resilience in difficult periods, particularly during the winter.
- Actively seek out acts of kindness and compassion around you.
- Be mindful of the information you consume.
It's not coincidental that the world's major religions celebrate festivals of light at this time of year. As the winter solstice approaches and darkness claims more and more daytime hours, we need the promise of life-sustaining light to keep hope alive during the cold, bleak months ahead.
I'd like to suggest four ways to stay resilient during challenging, dark times—the approaching days of winter here in the Northern Hemisphere and times like those we are living through today. They will help you "walk on the sunny side of the street," even when there seems to be more darkness than sunshine.
Look for the Light
By now, you have probably heard Mister Rogers' oft-cited quote:
"When I was a boy, and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’”
That's one way of saying look for the light.
Look for people who offer comfort to others who are suffering. Look at the doctors and nurses who devote their lives to treating other people's illnesses and injuries. Or teachers whose calling is to educate young minds to become thoughtful, informed citizens and guide our development from childhood to adulthood. They are sources of light, each and all.
I recently interviewed a cancer survivor and his wife for a magazine story I am writing about him. The wife cited the Mister Rogers quote above to describe their experience during her husband's lengthy course of treatment that has brought him to the point where he is cancer-free today.
"Find a little something to be grateful for," she said, noting that they found comfort in focusing on his medical providers. "And then," she added, "sometimes people were looking for the helpers, and it was us."
Being resilient means you have already come through "many dangers, toils and snares." Hopefully, you will become stronger, more mature, and compassionate. Being resilient means you have successfully broken through the darkness you confronted.
This means you have light to offer others, too. You have insights to share that can help someone else avoid an error you made yourself. Maybe you can calm someone's fear as they face a procedure you had yourself.
Share the light. Share the wisdom life has taught you. You may well be someone's answered prayer.
Filter the Darkness
A college professor of mine once made a comment that has stuck with me all these decades later. He said how we think about something comes down to what we fill our imaginations with. He was talking about pornography and sex.
But it's not a far leap to include, say, violence. Fill a mind with images of violence in movies or video games, and don't be surprised to find a worldview that sees violence everywhere and can't distinguish between virtual and actual reality.
Today, television can broadcast real-life, real-time violence directly into our homes. After warning us of the shocking images to follow, we are assaulted by horrific scenes of death, destruction, and sorrow.
You have a choice here: Will you be a passive consumer of the news? Take whatever is thrown at you, no matter how upsetting. Or will you curate the information you take in by filtering how much of the world's horrors you expose yourself (or your children) to?
Instead of allowing yourself to be subject to whatever horrific scenes the TV network may throw at you in its quest to present dramatic visuals, what about finding alternate ways to stay informed—such as reading the news online, ideally from a respected, professional news organization?
I used this strategy to remain as calm as possible during the first uncertain months of the coronavirus pandemic in early 2020. It was a frightening time before we knew exactly how whatever it was caused the new deadly infectious disease. Anxiety was through the roof.
Depression seemed like the entire world's lot. Each morning, I would sit at the table to read my online newspapers. I would weep as I read about all the older adults dying from COVID-19 in those dreadful days before treatments and vaccines became available.
My mom died only a few months before the pandemic began, and I had spent plenty of time visiting her in nursing homes during her final years. It was too easy for me to picture the excruciating situations inside the world's nursing homes. It hurt my heart to think about families forced to say goodbye to their dying loved ones through a glass window or in a Zoom chat. I deliberately avoided watching TV news because I didn't want to be even more traumatized than I already felt simply by reading about the terrible suffering happening worldwide.
Accept What You Can't Change
In choosing to filter what I let in, I drew upon lessons in resilience I had already learned by the time COVID hit. One was from living through the HIV-AIDS pandemic beginning in the early 1980s, writing about it as a journalist for many years, and living with the virus myself since my 2005 diagnosis. I learned to listen only to credible sources of information and to follow the best science-based recommendations to protect myself and others and to support my health and well-being.
The other lesson from what I had long tried to practice from the Serenity Prayer: Finding the serenity to accept what I can't change, the courage to change what I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Knowing that you alone are powerless to end the darkness in the world today—the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, climate change, racial tensions, the list goes on—you can choose how much of that darkness you expose yourself to. Maybe you should choose not to have a TV in your home that is constantly turned to the news. Don't always look online for news updates. And definitely don't give credence to anyone's opinions on social media who claims to have "the answers."
Instead, go about your life. Be aware of all the dreadful things happening in the world. Contribute where you can to help those in need. Sign petitions. Attend public forums.
But also be sure to carry on with gift buying and giving, watching sentimental Christmas movies, decorating for the holidays, and basking in the warmth and good cheer of friends and family. Those things provide high returns on your investment of time and attention. They help you to be resilient. And they help to make life worthwhile.
