Feel Good Factor

AND WITH that our lives became a piece of history. I honestly never expected things to change so considerably in such a short space of time. The life we knew, the life that we thought would happen has completely been turned upside down by something that none of us can see. We have gone from planning GCSEs, college interviews, birthdays, weddings, holidays, retreats, courses, conferences, shows and gigs to none of that, a life staying at home wondering what life will look like, wondering if it will ever be the same again.

It’s so easy at times like this to become obsessed with possible futures. I’ve heard this week colleagues, friends and family, start almost every conversation with ‘what if ’ and then share their worry and fear of the worst possible scenario and it’s so easy to do as businesses are closing, dreams are being dashed and families are separated.

Life has reminded us of something that we have forgotten, that the only thing that is certain about life is its beautiful uncertainty. But of course uncertainty is the one thing that we, as humans, really don’t find beautiful at all. In fact we find it scary, stressful and fraught with worry.

So how can be we be OK with this? How can we feel certainty in an uncertain world?

Well, I had a reminder in my eldest daughter, having had her dreams of GCSEs and leaving school and all that that entailed dashed and finding herself in a land of limbo with at least five months on her hands. Two days later, she dusted herself off and secured herself a job at a nearby supermarket.

Whilst I think that she is super special, in fact, what she shows all of us is the innate resilience in all human beings, the ability to bounce back, to come up with solutions that work for us, even when we don’t think that we can. We may need a little time to allow the dust to settle, but every time, we will find a way to not only survive but thrive. It runs through each and everyone of us like lettering through a stick of rock and knowing that enables us to know that in the face of all of this uncertainty, we will be okay, not just now in this moment, but in every single moment in the future too.

However, it is so easy to get caught up in the ‘what if ’ thinking, that takes us to a place in our minds which is so scary and fearful. But when we start to notice that that ‘what if ’ thinking is a simple trick of the mind, an illusion that it has created – it has to be as none of us can predict the future, as these events have illustrated – we fall out of it immediately, into a feeling of calm, of ease, and of hope, and it is in this feeling that we know, for certain, that we will be okay.

When we nurture this feeling, it starts to grow and become stronger, we begin to notice it more and from this place we see clearer the illusions that our minds create that lead us to experience fear, worry and stress. And whilst it’s completely human to get caught up in our own insecure thinking, we naturally begin to notice it more, and often, fall out of it quicker, enabling us to experience and know our own innate resilience and innate capacity to thrive.

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