#535 – How can you maintain hope in times of distress?

When all we see in the news and our social media feeds is violence and fear, it's easy to fall into the trap of believing that violence and fear is all there is.

When we fear for our integrity, fear feels inescapable.

That's me these days: the most ubiquitous fear in my mental feed is, "will I find a job that allows me to support my family?"

I could give in to the despair and see the rejection letters as proof that there aren't jobs for me. At a deeper level, the fear tells me I'm "unemployable" and I'll cause my family to eat up our savings and become destitute. But that'd be lazy.

Besides the fact that thinking that violence and fear are everywhere is due to my "availability bias*," I can't expect to get out of the hole by continuing to dig in.

I need to recognize that fear is just my Ego and Ghosts poking their fingers at my soul.

In E-Squared, Pam Grout uses walking from Biloxi, Mississippi, to New Orleans, Louisiana, as a metaphor to explain the work you need to do to stay open to possibility.

When you start walking, she writes, it all seems possible. You've left Biloxi and feel optimistic about New Orleans. But soon you start realizing how much you still need to walk. Out of desperation and fear, you're tempted to walk back to Biloxi.

That's when you close the door to hope and, with that, to the possibility of change.

So, the work is to keep the certainty that we will make it to New Orleans because that's where the road leads to. By doing that, we're upholding the belief that change is possible.

That's spiritual hope.

What change do you want to believe is possible in the world?

Love,

Carolina

*Psychologists Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky discovered that we tend to give more importance to information that is readily available and recent. Read more about it in Kahneman's bestselling book, Thinking, Fast and Slow.