Despair is among our greatest barriers to change. And yet, it can be incredibly challenging to get out of this mindset given the daily barrage of negative media.
One of my key strategies for coping with despair is zooming out. We can always broaden our perspective, either temporally or spatially, and see things differently. Worried about politics in America? Well, elsewhere in the world we’ve seen dramatic gains in democracy. Worried about the fate of the planet under climate change? Well, the planet will be totally fine eons in the future when we are gone. Worried that the Sun will one day blow up and consume the planet? Well, life will go on, in a beautiful new way, somewhere else in the universe.
There’s always an opportunity to take a more expansive, more life-affirming perspective. It’s up to us to choose which perspective we feed.
