Embrace it and you can make it through anything

Are the Covid-19 restrictions getting you down? No doubt they’re cramping our style and probably preventing us from doing many of the things we like to do. A lot of us have forgotten how to have fun. Stress levels are increasing steadily; tempers are getting shorter and working with some people is just getting to be more and more unpleasant. We need relief. Let me share a recent phone conversation.

“Hi Ron, what are you up to?” “I’m sailing.” “How can you be sailing? You didn’t put your boat in the water this year because of the Covid restrictions!” “I’m on someone else’s boat.” “Where are you sailing?” “Gardiner Bay. It’s on the eastern end of Long Island. We’re currently circumnavigating Shelter Island.”

“Long Island, New York? I saw you last night. You didn’t say anything about this. How did you get down to New York so quickly?” Now she had me. Getting out to the eastern end of Long Island is not as easy as getting to the city. “I’m doing this in my mind. I’m reading this great book, “The Coast of Summer,” by Anthony Bailey. I’m pretending I’m on the boat with him, and we’re having a great time.”

“You’re crazy!” “Maybe I am, but right now, I seem to be a lot happier than you are.”

Admittedly, it’s not as good as sailing for real, but it’s a lot better than just sitting around replaying 39 verses of “Aw gee, ain’t it awful?”

What do you really like to do? When you’re feeling stressed, why not take a break and imagine yourself doing something you really enjoy. Yes, I know, you don’t have time, but I would contend, you don’t have time not to.

There’s an ancient Greek saying, “Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make angry.” When we’re stressed or angry, we lose our ability to think clearly. We inadvertently make things worse, increasing our stress, making things still worse.

It’s a terrible cycle. A few minutes or even a few hours of attitude adjustment can save us lots of trouble down the road.

If you’re a golfer, you might enjoy a story about U.S. Navy pilot Capt. Jack Sands. He was shot down over Vietnam, imprisoned in solitary confinement in a tiny cell in Hanoi for seven years.

To keep from going crazy, each day he played an imaginary round of golf in his cell. He played all his favorite courses, and each drive was perfect. He never even missed a putt.

He had been a casual golfer shooting about 100 prior to his stay at the Hanoi Hilton. Upon his release, he scored a 74 in his first round in over eight years. This is without ever touching a golf club in all those years, but he had practiced in his mind. He had so many images of himself doing it perfectly that his game improved dramatically.

Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning” had a profound influence on me when I was in college. Dr. Frankl was a Viennese psychologist. He was Jewish and was imprisoned in Auschwitz after Hitler invaded Austria.

The average life expectancy in Auschwitz for someone in the work detail was only three months. Yet he found prisoners who had survived for years. When he interviewed them, he found they were living for a higher purpose. They had to survive, so they could achieve some noble task.

According to Dr. Frankl, “The last of the human freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.”

Adolf Hitler was immensely powerful.

He could arrest you, imprison you, torture you, kill you, but he couldn’t control your thinking unless you let him.

If those starving, tortured prisoners could rise above their circumstances, why can’t I?

We think the Covid restrictions are draconian, and they are in some cases. Regardless, we can allow them to beat us or we can rise above them. The choice is ours and nobody else’s.

So maybe your job got a lot harder in March, and there’s no relief in sight. Dwelling on that merely deepens the misery.

Go for a walk while thinking of something you enjoy. You just might find the job getting easier and more pleasant, even though it hasn’t changed.

You’ve changed, and that makes all the difference.

Ronald J. Bourque, a consultant and speaker from Salem, has had engagements throughout the United States, Europe and Asia. He can be reached at 603-898-1871 or RonBourque3@gmail.com.