The Urgency Illusion: How to stay present when big things happen in the world

Last week I felt way more on edge than usual. There were new lockdown restrictions here in Austria due to COVID, the US elections kept me checking the news every few minutes and a terrorist attack shook up the country. My belly was tight and the world felt gray. Quickly, I felt preoccupied with so many things at once.

My experience is that when events like these happen, I can feel an urge to drop everything and somehow get involved and do things related to these events. Or to fall into apathy. Some of that feels good, yet often the intention it’s coming from is one of my underlying fear, anger, hatred, or sadness. I witness this in others often too. The more I reflect on this, the more it becomes clear to me that this is usually a dead-end. The more helpful way forward seems to be to attend to my emotions and state of being first, before I’m doing anything with it.

Hard, yet simple. Especially when so much is coming at us all at once.

Being touched, but not led astray

My friend Matthias told me recently on a hike through the forest, how he spent some time meditating on the terrorist attacks. His intention was to see the causes and conditions that led to it, casting a net as wide as possible. To me, this was a great example of letting ourselves be touched by current events, but not led astray. I would illustrate it like this:

The patterns I see the most and know well from myself, that I believe aren’t very helpful are two extreme reactions to current events:

• apathy or “I don’t care…”: I simply carry on with my life, pretending that nothing happened or ignoring any major current events that have shaken up the world. This tends to keep me focused, but also makes my work and attention kind of lifeless, apathetic, and overall feel disconnected from my own intentions and dreams.
• flooded or “OMG, drop everything & let’s do something!”: Here I have such a strong reaction that I want to take to the streets immediately, express my anger, hurt, sadness, and pain in the hopes that it will improve the situation. I feel reactive and righteous that I’m doing something about the situation.

I believe that neither of these reactions helps us create the life and world that we ultimately want to see. And I think there’s a middle way, that uses the wisdom of both of these more extreme directions:

• Care: When there is a major external event after we’ve gotten to safety, whether it’s from disease, attack, or something else, we first need care. By care, I mean our ability to tend to the emotional and inner states that have been evoked from the event. Tending to our anger, hurt, pain, feeling our sadness, tears, and frustration. This can take some time and the more support we have to feel through these elements of life, the more enjoyable this part can be for us.
• Integration with the life you want: Once the big emotions have settled, we can turn our attention to integration and meaning-making. What does it mean that we have experienced this? How does this connect with our bigger intention of living the life we want? An example from my own life is that through plenty of reflection on the coronavirus crisis and the amount of physical distancing and disconnection has birthed a new idea of a product to help us reconnect in a meaningful way, even when we’re not in the same room together. I’ve deeply enjoyed working on this the last weeks, it doesn’t feel reactive, yet it seems to be aligned with what is happening in the wider world and my dream of creating more presence and aliveness for myself and the people I meet.

Letting the urgency illusion pass and acting with power

As the urgency illusion passes, there comes a window for all of us where we can be present to what happened and at the same time have enough space inside for ourselves and our dreams. This is the sweet spot, where we can make useful sense of ourselves and the world around us.

If you’re stuck along the journey towards integration right now, here’re some questions that you might find helpful to journal with:

• Care-questions: What needs to be tended to on the inside? How are you doing? What level of care would support you the most right now?
• Integration-questions: What are the 3 most important values for you to live into in this life? Where is the overlap between those and what happened in the world? How can you move forward in integrity with what happened, without throwing everything overboard?

From there, see which actions naturally arise for you as you give yourself space and time to let everything integrate.

Whatever you’re going through, keep going, sending love and care your way!