When we were kids, my younger sister climbed an old pine tree that reached to the roof of our Victorian farm house. My Mother was changing sheets and saw her from a second story window. When my sister was safely on the ground, our Mom met her with hugs, tears and lecturing mixed with the impulse to spank her, concern about how she’d be portrayed in the news if my sister had died and a promise to tell our Father.

A young child climbing an old tree two stories up is a true “existential threat.” Only Superman could easily stay calm. Why? Because it’s something Superman could have fixed. My Mom has some super powers, but in that case she had no control over the situation. And that is when things get scary.

It’s no secret that calm has become the exception and anxiety, fear, anger and depression have all become the norm in our world. But there comes a time when we have to stop raging, worrying and falling into despair over everything outside our control. That time is always now.

When scrolling social media, reading the news or watching television sends us down a rabbit hole of fight, flight or freeze, we have become off balance. Not without good reason. It’s a truly scary world. The Pandemic isolated us, and that isolation fractured communities as everyone staked out a spot on their Covid risk tolerance and responsibilities. Meanwhile, that same disease isolated us from each other. When we emerged from our Pandemic holes, we forgot how to behave as human beings.

We endured almost a decade of viciously — even violently — contested politics, threats to our nation and democracy, and now a European war involving Russia and her authoritarian minded allies versus Ukraine and the Western democracies. And then there’s the Levant. But I remember fearing The Bomb as a kid. I remember The Challenger disaster, 9/11, the Recession.

I remember this fear and growing up with it. But I haven’t lived through a full blown hot war in Europe. I had never lived through a pandemic or plague. The stench of authoritarianism creeping into our culture, nor the violence and the ambitions of soulless men.

But ask your parents or grandparents, and maybe they remember the Cuban Missile Crisis, the paranoia culture of the Cold War, the assassinations of both a president, his brother and civic leaders, world wars, Spanish flu, polio and a world wide economic disaster in the Great Depression. Ever since some fool called the fall of the Soviet Union “the end of history,” history kept on happening. We sometimes didn’t know what was happening, or it seemed so far away. But video cameras brought us the Rodney King beating, and we could no longer claim ignorance. Now everyone has a video camera in their pocket. We’re all one person news reporters plugged into 24/7 news outlets.

And that is my point. The sky is always falling somewhere. We’re just not used to being bombarded with all of it and what everyone thinks of it all at once. We simply cannot process it. And while history goes on making itself, the daily struggles of our own lives go on. It is simply too much. We need a step back from it all. When we give ourselves the luxury of a bit of space between ourselves and what we fear, we gain perspective. And we learn to cope. We take control of the only piece we can control, ourselves.

When my Mom saw my sister in the tree, all she could do was scream, then try to stay calm until my sister climbed down. And now we laugh about it. Mom did what she could in the moment, and with perspective, the terrifying became a funny story.

Learning about The Fall of Rome or the plagues that have wiped out millions of us over history helps give us that necessary perspective. Bad things happen. They always will. As Zorba the Greek said, “Life is trouble! Only death is no trouble.” The only thing we can do is manage our reactions to that essential fact.

So, for your own health, give yourself the grace to take time off, to not have the bandwidth to take in anymore information, take care of yourself and your world and learn to cultivate your own peace. Zorba danced. I practice meditation and yoga. So figure out your way to carve out some peace for yourself. Just start with five minutes a day. Sit or walk in nature. Play with your non-human animal friends or with children. Pick up a book or a video game controller.

Do it every day. Make sure you have that time to find that peace that is inside of you if you make room for it. Decide what limits to make on intrusions into your peace and enforce them. Your nervous system will thank you, and so will the people in your life.

Find your peace and protect it, you peaceful warrior Legends!

-J. Lakis ✌🏼❤️💪🏼

If you or anyone you know is experiencing domestic/sexual violence please contact RAIIN by phone or chat.

If you’re considering suicide, self harm, or have a mental health crisis: call or text 988 any time to talk or text with someone from the National Suicide Prevention and Crisis Hotline. Help is always available in English or Spanish.

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