“Look at the sky over there!” my wife said. And as I turned around, immediately I could see what she meant. The low hanging dark clouds were a total surprise. The other direction in which I had been looking the sky was as blue as could be. I never expected a storm. How could I? Everything I saw up to that point was fine.
Both views needed to be real for me. If I ignored the fact that the storm was coming soon, it would only result in me getting needlessly soaked. On the other hand, to forget that the way I was looking was also a reality would be to make a blue sky dark when it wasn’t. Both were real.
During trauma, stress, and a pandemic like we are going through now the same is true: things are tough and scary…but they are also filled with possibility if we have the eyes to see.
The problem is that people often find simultaneously entertaining both realities is too difficult for them. And so, they turn their backs on one part of the situation. They either want to see things as totally dark, or at least discomforting, and speak only about that, or they involve themselves in a sense of “spiritual romanticism” by sugar-coating things and pointing only to what are possible good outcomes of the pandemic for them.
A sign of psychological and spiritual maturity is the ability to hold the challenges we have in one hand and the possibilities in the other. By doing this we are able to honor what is truly dark or dim but not be captured by it. Instead, through the eyes of gratefulness, when we hold both together in our hearts and minds, we are in an excellent position to gain a different sense of clarity. This will increase our ability to spot what unexpected darkness may cognitively shift in us to our benefit in how we presently view our inner and outer worlds.
When this happens, although darkness can (and probably should) throw us off kilter in the moment (or longer!), it does allow us to view ourselves and the world in ways that would not have been possible before. The reason for this is that even though, before the darkness, we may have wanted to have a broader perspective on life it just wasn’t possible because our lives were drifting along and that is all we thought our life could hold and be.
Yet, by holding BOTH realities (darkness and hope) together when situations becomes tough or seemingly impossible, there can be so much more in life for us. In embracing the ENTIRE situation both realistically and hopefully, we can set the stage to become deeper, more appreciative, more helpful and more fulfilled by the new perspective that surfaces and is seen by us…simply because we were looking for it!
Dr. Robert J. Wicks is the author of THE TAO OF ORDINARINESS: Humility and Simplicity in a Narcissistic Age and PERSPECTIVE: The Calm within the Storm (both from Oxford University Press).
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