Nine Tools For Tough Times
1. a phrase to hang on to
Create automated responses. Pick a phrase, stitch a sentence, find some words and memorise them like a map to home. Every time someone asks you to share, how has it been? Spurt it out like your phone number, without much effort. You don’t have to find strength to invent or craft a new response on hard days.
Let this be your simple solution because the world will go on to ask, to show care, to overstep or go absconding. You will be required to respond to each plea, text, reflection, a call offering help, sooner or later. Prepare a scripted answer, it’s okay.
Your intent is to acknowledge not to impress.
2. a person to dial up and dial down
Actually make that two. Just incase the first one is stuck in a team meeting, running late for a house party or is out of network. Have a backup; but not too many. Choose these two people wisely. Not someone who throws advice like darts, each time you state a problem. Find someone who can ask thoughtful questions, replay your amazement to you and gently, even let you sulk and sob as if you are mourning everything bad that ever happened to you.
Remember even pain is a privilege and you get to decide who gets to see you broken.
3. a playlist of imperfect songs
Let the melancholy of Dolly Parton morph into the mumblings of Farida Khanum. Do not resist, if Pharrell queues up after Adele or even Jackson. Allow for a melange of melodies, sad and happy and a zillion emotions in between to dance around you, nudging you to see how cruel and caring it can be. Play on loop a song that serves the words that you haven’t mustered courage to utter, as yet.
Music holds space sometimes like people cannot. Certain songs—even with their melody, words and beats—become portals into a silence. Invite your mind to enter that sacred silence and to come out of it, naked and new.
4. a graceful pause that punctuates speed
As the saying goes, ‘Bad things never have a good timing’. So encourage yourself to not be impulsive about anything. That escape trip, the rebound, that not-so-good job, that confrontation, all can be taken up, just after a moment of considered pause. In a world that demands immediacy, and pretends everything is urgent, claim your right to act slow. ‘Tough times’ are the coupon codes for this offer, use generously before they expire.
5. a tiny ritual of ordinary action
Make your bed at ease, hug a tree, take long showers or stare out of a window. Uncertainties bring along a newness that is unfamiliar and uncomfortable. In moments of wavering peace, initiate and participate in a predictable routine. Sit in the sun every morning, have your cup of coffee as an incense fills up the room, take a walk, read something nice, even if two pages, meditate, it can be anything as long as it becomes a ritual enacted through ordinary action.
When challenges are grand enough, your efforts to counter them don’t have to be.
6. the ability to push your phone away
Scrolling isn’t a therapy for your heart. Neither is jumping online to see whether they are or not? Those three dots, labelled ‘typing’, pulsating on the top of your chatbox, is a mirage. Don’t fall for it. When the text arrives, you’ll know. Until then, don’t let the anticipation of a notification, the illusory chime of an email nauseate your present. Pretend that internet wasn’t invented, forget social media exists for long intervals and ignore anything that needs a wifi to activate for a while. A screen Vipassana is also an ointment that heals bruised sense of self.
7. a lullaby of long-gone yet good things
As the mind races past midnight, decides at an odd hour to remind you of a thumping hurt or plays with a wound still raw from the last argument, hum to yourself a lullaby of good memories. Recreate in your head that evening in a house you are always welcomed in, a party that you did not wish to leave, the way a loved one called your name when they first met you. Gather together adventures that have graced your days, filled your phone photo albums and pull out compliments, pressed like soft flowers between conversations, dust off the dust.
Hum that you are all those things, still.
8. a 'will' pill to swallow that hard lesson
If the obstacle has reached you, the learning from it might not be far. Lean in, look close. Use both hands and break the sorrow into two parts like a fortune cookie. Retrieve and read whatever aphorism, or vague prophecy it holds. Chant the life lesson, over and over again, like those monks in the monastery praying for something incomprehensible, yet healing in their power.
With time the story will wither away. You’ll start to forget the specifics—How, who, where and in what measure—but safe keep the moral. It’s yours now to treasure and use.
9. a shoebox of uncanny acceptances
Adversity robs us of many things—tender promises, loud bouts of laughter, a happy tear trickling down the cheek and a glint in the eye that holds a promise. But never allow it to talk you out of acceptance for facts, as old and true as time—Life is pain (and some joy) but mostly pain and still worth it, people disappoint when you least expect them to, not all dreams come true, nothing lasts forever, make the most of now and perhaps, if you can get yourself to admit in tiny whispers that hope is fragile but immortal. It hides, camouflages, gets buried, loses its way but it never perishes. It's only a matter of time, until you find it again with in and with everything.