Adapting to Changing Times: Time for Reflection
We live in changing times. Our ways of thinking about our life or how we do things are no longer as certain. The world is changing at a fast pace, it’s speeding up, high levels of connectivity and information is on a continuum.
Taking time for reflecting on how you want to live your life; what will you need to re-evaluate? What was suddenly thrust upon you as a result of COVID19 and other life changing moments to say life is no longer the same is confronting.
“Change does not roll on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle”
Martin Luther King
The enforced physical and social distancing rules of COVID19 highlighted the challenge of how to stay connected with family, friends, loved ones near and far is made available through technology. The personal difficulties included the loss of physical and emotional contact, freedom of movement, everyday rituals and choice. We were asked to be responsible and have taken pride in how Australia has responded to the crisis.
However, the lasting ramifications of the current catastrophic life-changing events; fires, climate change, drought, floods and the impact on personal losses of homes, financial security and income, family members to illness, identity, cultural economic and moral differences are aplenty and under assessment.
The rules of society are changing. How prepared are you in considering and confronting those changes? As we begin the process of coming out of the COVID 19 crisis, everything we once knew about, assured of, and reasonably secure about is thrown into question. Some ways of being may not survive. What was once routine and predictable is no longer dependable and guaranteed. As personal and cataclysmic global events continue and are felt around the world and at home, how are you responding?
“A change is brought about by ordinary people doing extraordinary things”
Barack Obama
Take time to re-evaluate your life
How have you evaluated your lived experience so far, and what do you need to consider in this new space of uncertainty? We try to know what the future holds when really, we don’t know what is going to happen. We can’t predict the future in advance.
Taking time to re-evaluate your life can help. Re-evaluating is about how we are responding to those changes in our lives. We can be caught up in two ways of responding, passive or active. Passive is our attempt to try to hold onto something which no longer works or benefit or exists to the same degree as before. There is a protective element to holding on to how life should be in order to stave off change.
Some people hold on to values and beliefs that drive how they think society should live and be. They become evangelical in their drive to hold on to something that is difficult to recreate as society moves in a different direction. It is similar to a belief in a system or philosophy that must endure and continue for the belief in the fundamental value and approach is the right and true way as others move in a different direction. There is an anxiety towards blaming external forces and others as experienced as a threat to their existence. On a global scale, this is already happening in the world around us in the rise of nationalism, Brexit, Trump, uprise in right-wing fractions global dislocation and cultural changes.
Being active in your response to change means to embrace the anxiety and anguish of life events by going beyond the difficulties, fears and anxiety. To go beyond the anguish and to construct something meaningful requires confronting those fear. In so doing the engagement with an examined life allows different questions to be asked. It also provides for opportunities to re-evaluate values and beliefs, and to no longer assume that everything will return to the way it was before. A restorative effect emerges.
As physical and social distancing is lessened and life returns to what was normal before, what changes are you ready to make? Fear and anxiety is normal to experience where there is change that is uncertain. Perhaps the direction for your life is lost momentarily or it is no longer accessible through a loss you have experienced. Or, perhaps you feel this has been taken from you, it is out of your control? Not knowing where you are going even when you think you do is asking for to you to stop and reflect on how you want to live your life in these uncertain times.
“Only great pain, the long, slow pain that takes its time … compels us to descend to our ultimate depths… I doubt that such pain makes us “better”, but I know it makes us more profound…”
(Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science)
The philosophers brought their struggles and anguish to us in their writing. They provide a place where we can reflect on our lives. Existential psychotherapy offers a space for examining the lived experience. In this time of change, taking time out to reflect can’t be a bad thing. It is difficult in wanting everyday life to return to how things were; the same as before is almost futile in its thinking. Nothing can return to the same previous way. However, it is in the now, with a future focus towards a changed life, one that you have responded to is about being responsive to possibilities. Transformation happens when you engage with the unknown, the uncertainty of your currently lived life with a focus towards a future of your creation.
If your life has changed, are experiencing emotional pain, in need of a space for reflection then call Adam today to make an appointment.