Morning Reflection: Breaking Point

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Breaking Point.

I don’t know if you’ve dared to venture out onto the internet in the last few days, but if you have, I’m guessing you’ve noticed it too.

Social media has always had the ability to twist the truth and inflame the senses, but as we are all coming to terms with terrifying reality of ‘the new normal’, the level of toxicity and outright hostility is growing to levels we haven’t seen before.

And there doesn’t seem to be a way of stopping it.

I’ve tried, believe me. In two specific threads last week, I tried to mitigate the anger and vehement nature of the people involved in the comments.

Trying to find a pathway of peace, I pointed out that there were different ways to interpret what they had seen, and different avenues for moving forward in the problems that we all faced.

I might as well have been standing on the beach, screaming at the tide to stay out.

Believe me, I get that we are all on edge right now. I try to never react unkindly to anything, and always respond in a peaceful and peace promoting way, and right now that is taking so much more emotional energy than it ever has before, which is a really bad things because I feel like I have less and less of that energy every day.

Which I think is true for all of us.

Because the uncertainty, the fear, the restrictions and the reality are piling up on us, and the usual avenues for blowing off steam are not necessarily available to us right now.

For me, it means I can’t drive up to the mountains, and the flight to the coast that we had planned for around now has been put on hold. I’m going stir crazy being stuck in a house with people, and a dog, that I love, and I’m one of the lucky ones who actually gets to go to work because I’m apparently essential.

I think we’re all just trying to hold on, and not lose our minds.

Which also means that now, more than ever before, we need to strive to find peace inside of ourselves when we can’t seek it in any other way. Maybe for you that’s meditation, or prayer, or physical exercise or reading.

Maybe losing your mind in an epic binge-watch of some new series on Netflix is what does it for you. Whatever it is, you probably need to do more of it right now, just so that you can hold on to whatever shred of sanity you happen to have left.

Whatever it takes so that you can treat yourself and those around you with kindness, do that thing.

My wife has a phrase that she repeats often in her own writing. “Be kind, do good. Love is a verb”. I think now, more than ever, we need to be being kind, and doing good.

It won’t necessarily be fun, and it won’t necessarily be easy, but it is so very important right now. Surviving this pandemic is hard enough for all of us together, and it will be impossible if we try to do it apart.

So I would ask you today, to try to be patient with those who annoy you, and with those with whom you disagree. The more we say that we’re sorry, the better chance we have of coming out of this with our relationships and our sanity intact.

There are many casualties in a crisis. Sometimes it’s life, sometimes it’s love, and sometimes it’s the very decency that keeps us together as families, as communities and as a nation.

At a time when we could very well break apart, we need to be pulling together even stronger than before, even when it’s hard, even when it hurts.

I know we are all tired, and I know we all have our problems.

But we can’t let ourselves devolve into hatred. That way only leads to suffering.

And there’s too much of that going on already.

— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings