Don’t panic, it’s just complexity.
I went out this morning to a beautiful day with warmer sun than I have recently felt and birds excitedly announcing spring. In this wonderful moment, the only thing that was disturbing the baseline of approaching spring was the word in my head, “Pandemic”.
Although the presence of a new virus that we are now getting acquainted with globally is unsettling, the rise in my concern personally is the unpredictable collective response to this event. Although, now that I have said unpredictable, I feel that is not entirely true. Modern humans, especially in my own country have made it clear that we can predict a fairly destructive pattern of panic and chaos following anything that threatens to disrupt the perfect world we have invented for ourselves.
When did we become so fragile?
How many choices ago did we rebelliously depart from the way of nature, and how many choices do we have left before nature absorbs us and our “perfect world”?
It is the undisciplined human response to crisis and the various unintended consequences which quickly leads to the compounding problems no one can predict. In our global society we are becoming painfully aware of our interdependence as we watch our collective actions ricochet through the economic, social, political and environmental worlds. Enter overwhelm.
How do we become resilient?
How is one to act in the face of such complexity? When things are challenging, the first step we must take to reclaim our resilience is learning how to stop. “Stop moving, be still, be quiet and slow down” is what mother nature demands. “Pay attention to what is really happening. Listen, watch and see things as they are” she says.
We must distinguish the noise in our head from the sound in our environment. All wild things know this instruction. This is not freezing in panic, rather it is pausing and checking in with the wisdom of nature around you and within you.
Our inner nature then asks of us, “how does this make me feel?” Not the stories, headlines and hearsay but instinctively what do you feel about this, what do you know?
It is ok if you don’t like the answers. In fact, it may challenge your addiction to the cultural dream of “progress at all costs.” It is not possible to be in constant motion. Nature, and remember you are nature, moves in cycles and process and real progress comes from honoring that process not resisting it. This is true resilience- fitting into our actual environment and not wishing it was something else.
Can it be that easy?
Lao Tsu said, "do the difficult things while they are easy and do the great things while they are small." We have all heard this wisdom and trust that the smallest action is important- like giving others space, washing your hands, picking up some trash or staying home and working on your garden. But why is it so hard to believe that such simple actions could change the world around us and lead to a chain of events that we could not predict? Most of our challenges in life could be reduced to confronting the mysterious complexity of reality as a limited creature. Because of complexity we can't really know how important a small action may be.
To make matters worse, complexity is compounded with entropy- the natural tendency for things to go from order to disorder based on a system's degrees of freedom at any moment on its way to energetic equilibrium. From a human perspective, this is summed up by Murphy's law which states, "if something can go wrong- it will." This leaves us in a landscape of actions whose impact will occasionally be good but are far more likely to be sub-optimal and more harmful than beneficial.
How are we to do "good" as we navigate in this complex realm of cause and effect relationships with so many "bad" alternatives? The solution may be closer than you think. As a living creature, my natural bias is towards more life, and as much as the nearest supernova and the rest of the universe has no concern for the brief and puny phenomena of life, to me and those living things around me, it matters a lot. This value of life gives me purpose, meaning and guidance in a vast entropic universe- a primal mission: resist entropy, exist, get the genes to the next generation, and contribute to the greater system so life can play out a little longer.
This is life. A deep drive and an ancient story which, as I feel my heart beating and take my next breath, is clearly following some original instructions beyond my awareness.
Functioning as an adaptive interface between our experience and overwhelming complexity, our unconscious mind is sorting, gathering and processing one million times the information of our conscious mind with a built-in bias for life, and making connections with very little information- very quickly. This is where our intuition and instinct become our best guide, by sensing the patterns in the chaos. This system primarily speaks to us in a language of symbols, feelings, and patterns, and when it is aligned with the life value, it can guide us to more subtle and frequent life supporting behaviors to "do the right thing."
When presented with a choice in how we respond to challenge, the heroic mindset require us to set our own expectations, fears and judgments aside and quiet our thoughts to contact our feelings. From this place we can better access our natural wisdom that is attuned to the subtle communications which can guide us to take the small actions that may in time lead to unpredictable and beneficial consequences for the greater whole.
What you can do when you feel overwhelmed:
Stop.
Get quiet and still
Notice what is going on around you
Check in with yourself frequently
Ask “what am I feeling?”
Ask “am I safe?”
Ask “what is the one thing which if I did it would make everything easier or unnecessary?”
Take a small action in that direction
Notice the results and share with others
Be grateful
Keep going!
written by Ben Sanford
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