Glimmers - Post Pandemic Emptiness & the Potential for Joy

Have we become a society so conditioned to daily chaos, negativity & fear that we’ve forgotten how to focus our attention on the potential for joy? Have we become so comfortable in our discomfort & complaining that even the potential to seek out positive experience is outside of our comfortable capacity?

Perhaps for some (for most, I assume), cycles of negative thought patterns & fault-finding in common triviality is actually the new comfort zone.

Triggers, we all have many, but we seem to be triggered more & more, & by littler & littler.
Or is it that the many little triggers over time & through years of pandemic have left us all hard-wired to expect & accept disaster & discomfort as part of our daily lives. Perhaps, the repeated pandemic news broadcasts have left us expecting the worst & actively anticipating even worse yet to come, having inadvertently conditioned us into becoming the most depressed & anxious generation of people to haunt modern civilisation.

Hope feels lost to many still, even with the pandemic having passed.
But the past is what paves the neural pathways of our future; our habits, our feelings, our actions.
It's brain science, you see.

Meaning what, Dee?

Well, if you think of an empty field of grass & it is through this field of grass that you must trek back & forth each day to go about your business.

On the first day you take foot straight across the field in the direction you need to go, the grass is a little high, but you make your way through.

On day two, you look at the field & notice that the grass has been flattened a little by the footsteps that you trod yesterday, making it a little easier to walk this path. Naturally, you’ll take this exact path once again.

On day three, you approach the field & you notice the grass has died out a little along the path of your previous footsteps. You’ll walk this path again with ease.

On day four, the grass has completely subsided & a dirt track now rests along the path you have now travelled, day after day. Off you set along this newly formed path.

On day five, guess which path you take?

Well, there is only one path now, Dee.

Exactly.

And this is also how the neural pathways in your brain are created as well, which will map out your subconscious choices, habits, intentions & actions. You’ll take the ‘easiest’ path ahead which is the path well-travelled & it’s now the only path you know.

And for most of us, unfortunately, the path well-travelled has been carved out by the trauma we experienced during the pandemic, with news stories on repeat & directions to comply creating cycles of anxiety, cycles of dread, cycles of fear, cycles of self-isolation, loneliness & depression.

Whatever your experience of the pandemic, it wasn’t a good one.
Whichever side of the pandemic fence you sat on, it wasn’t a positive experience.

We became accustomed to relinquishing our control & sovereignty, decisions were not made by us, but for us.

And so here we are not day four, but year four post the commencement of the pandemic, is it any surprise that we have forgotten how to seek out the glimmers of life & seek out the potential for our joy?

It’s the joy that we had once & felt once; that sense of community & belonging. The enjoyment of travel & adventure. Of togetherness & freedom. Of shopping trips & coffee trips. Of pop-in visits & togetherness around the table.

It’s the sitting around & laughing that we’ve forgotten how to do, because for so long we had nothing to laugh about & no one to share the laugh with. The joy in going out for an ice cream or visiting a small country town because for so long we were not allowed to do those things which brought us joy.

And how many of us have tried to seek out these ice cream adventures of yesterday, only to find that the joy in our hearts no longer glimmer? It’s now just ice cream, with no joy.

But the joy it still lives, it’s just the path that we’ve ‘lost’ because we hadn’t trodden across that old field in some years.

But the joy, it’s still there. We have to choose the path to joy & keep choosing it each day.

Tread lightly, but keep treading, my friend, keep treading each day.
For the path to joy was not lost, my dear, we’ve just lost our way.

Dee

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