A New Kind of "What If"
I’m struggling today.
Every few minutes, when I manage to stop scrolling or busying myself with a phone game, I feel tears well up.
I exercised.
I drank a smoothie.
I’ve taken deep, slow breaths.
I made the bed.
Many times, these things help cue me into a bit more energetic focus and calm.
But… not today.
So what now?
The landscape of life right now feels (and in a lot of senses *genuinely is*) scary and dangerous and uncertain.
Things are literally on fire.
If I wanted evidence of hopelessness, it’s abundant.
But by now I’ve also learned that I have at least some power in the lens I choose for viewing my world and what’s around and within me.
Even typing that feels a bit … insufficient? As though I’m just saying, “Look on the bright side!” while the world falls apart.
Like I'm that wry meme of the cartoon dog in a room ablaze, blithely stating, “This is fine.”
But that’s not what I mean.
I know that there’s so, so much that’s out of our hands, individually.
I’m human. I get swept away in anxiety, dread, insecurity… those were some of my default settings growing up, in fact.
So it’s often been especially hard for me to shift into seeing anything positive in a given moment.
I don’t want to be blindsided by bad news, or caught off guard by something I hadn’t anticipated.
Because of that, I am an excellent ruminator, able to identify countless “what ifs,” often when I should be sleeping instead.
So here’s a What If: What if I used that same rumination skill in a different way?
What if I took that same, spinning antsy sensation and imagined it as raw fuel that can propel my thoughts in a new direction?
What if I used my decades of experience creatively generating possible tragedies to instead wonder, “What will I become even a little bit delighted by, today?”
What if I could pause and really ask, “Amidst all that’s going wrong or could go wrong… what is one little thing that is going right?”
Or if that feels impossible, “What is one thing that has gone wrong, but could have gone worse?”
Maybe we can’t move the needle toward the positive every moment. Or even every day.
Maybe it can be a win just to notice the needle, to notice the fact that we’re *trying* to shift our viewpoint.
When I start on this path, of “what is one thing that is going right, right now,” I am constantly amazed with everything that I find.
Sometimes, like today, it’s something like, “I am seeing myself bearing grief today, and struggling to feel anything but bad and scared, when I could be pretending or stuffing it down or numbing it or lashing out.”
Or: “In this moment, I see myself trying to protect myself from future pain by worrying and anticipating, but I also appreciate that by noticing this, I am resetting back to just letting myself feel some joy about something without squashing it for fear of its loss.”
We’ve evolved to have a strong negativity bias, which protected us as early humans who needed to be alert to dangers to survive.
Our nervous systems are so especially activated these days, with so many different kinds of threats (to government systems, to our physical health, to society, to our sense of connection, to bodies depending on skin color & gender, and so on).
These little moments of checking in with what isn’t failing might seem small in comparison.
But they add up.
They accumulate and multiply and rewire and become our new lens in a way that helps us to regulate and navigate all the threats with more agility and awareness.
They keep us active, and impactful, even in our own hearts.
If you ever need help with this process, please reach out; I’d love to help us shift to this kind of lens together.
Unpublished Work © 2020 Leah Marcus, MA
[Originally posted HERE]
