In these times we should celebrate small victories
I’M CALLING it my pandemic pivot – the moment when I realised that my ‘big’ plans have come to nothing this year but there are still things I can do in a day that count. My 2020 wasn’t meant to look like this. Whose was, in fact? When I look back to New Year’s Day and think of the year stretching ahead, I remember those best laid plans and think how naive I was.
They weren’t anything spectacular – a few travel plans, get-togethers with old friends I hadn’t seen in ages, spend less time on the phone and read more books, sprinkled with a few fitness goals and milestones I wanted to mark.
As we enter into the dying days of 2020, what have I got to show for the year? The answer is, I suspect, like a lot of other people’s – not much.
The first half of the pandemic was spent grappling with home schooling and trying to keep sane, the next was spent in a kind of suspended paralysis where making plans of any sort seemed foolish when another lockdown was inevitable.
It feels like so much of ordinary life has been thwarted. Much of the joy of life – the impromptu meal out to take a night off cooking, sitting over numerous cups of coffee with a treasured friend, catching up with your parents over a cup of tea – all had to go by the wayside, leaving us unmoored.
Covid-19 put paid to the grand plans and the simple plans, laying waste to the natural human condition of simply looking forward to things. Nothing could be taken for granted.
So when The New York Times asked readers to send in a list of their daily small parenting victories during the pandemic, the request unleashed an unprecedented response. It was as if recounting these small moments of satisfaction in a day, retelling the tiniest morsel of a daily achievement was helpful.
The list is full of things where people share tiny achievements – taking a shower counts – that in normal times wouldn’t warrant sharing except maybe with your nearest and dearest.
It made me think of how in these times, the small victories are worth celebrating; ordinary things like the new trial recipe turning into a family favourite, the clothes line full of clean laundry, a bracing walk in the wind, a long overdue phone call made.
If this is the year life goals fell apart, maybe now’s the time to mark the small things in a different way. We’ve become so used to doing, achieving, driving ourselves and our children to be better and be more that perhaps we’ve lost sight of the small victories of the day hiding in plain sight.
When I ask chartered psychologist Dr Damien Lowry about this, he says our brains have evolved to have an innate negative bias. In the midst of a global pandemic, he says the negative is at risk of being amplified even further.
Dr Lowry makes the point that our brain will give more currency to a negative incident than to a number of positive incidences which is why it’s really important to purposely remind ourselves of the positive.
Things like keeping a gratitude journal and actively writing things down can be helpful tools in changing the negative script and in bringing about change, he says.
And he points out that listing small victories can help recalibrate a negative slant that might be deepening in these uncertain times.
This is not about Pollyanna thinking but it is about overriding the negative loop that we can sometimes get caught up in. Ruminating over the things that have gone wrong is not only unhelpful, it can actually make things worse.
Instead of beating myself up about the things I haven’t managed to do today, this week or even this year, I’m trying to set the dial in a more positive direction.
I’ve been trying to see my tiny daily victories as a reminder that even though nothing momentous happened and my to-do list is getting longer the longer Covid lasts, I’m still doing things that have meaning and are useful to me, my family and my employers.
As I’ve done this, I’ve noticed a shift. It’s not quite a swing but it’s a perceptible change, an easing up of tension, a lightening of the load. I’m not berating myself as much about the things I haven’t managed to do.
So what if the laundry basket is overflowing? Isn’t it better that I made the most of a break in the rain to get out for a run between showers? So what if the kids were late to school again? Didn’t they go to school happy after sitting down to a cooked breakfast?
We’re hardwired to err on the side of caution. Expecting something to jump out of the bushes to eat us is what kept our ancestors alive. It also embedded a certain negativity deep into our DNA.
To cope with Covid, celebrating the small victories might just be a powerful ally to contend with the skulking menace of negative thinking.
There’s beauty in the small things. You just have to change the way you look at them. They might just add up to something quite big indeed.
If this is the year life goals fell apart, maybe now’s the time to mark the small things in a different way