Mental health is a continuous and conscious effort as a second wave of the COVID-19 virus rumbles through the population like a locomotive train without an engineer. Days are getting shorter, nights colder and Pacific Standard Time lurks around the corner like a pickpocket from a Charles Dickens’ novel, ready to steal an hour of light.
For folks with mental health concerns such as depression or anxiety, these are days where the silver lining is not visible and all the leftover turkey has been tasting like salt and shoe leather for a couple weeks.
A little melancholy is okay; it’s a rational human response to be worried when forces of nature, like a pandemic, make life uncertain. However, when states of sadness and worry become disproportionate to circumstances and there is an impossible heaviness to life, work is required to kick-start momentum toward a better reality in thought and action. Mental health is a verb.
For me, a simple start is to somehow reinforce the reality that it is human to react to danger and challenges in our lives with worry and anger. Without the immediate response of concern, or even aggression, toward threats in our environment, our species would have been extinct thousands of years ago.
My feelings of anger are a good thing; I have to embrace my anger and shape it into a positive, motivating action instead of negativity like substance abuse or violence.
People run marathons in record times and create art that changes the world with anger as a motivating force. Or, as Alec Guinness’ character Obi-Wan Kenobi said to Luke Skywalker in Star Wars: “Luke, you must learn the ways of the force.”
Now reality has been blurred with flashbacks to movies of my childhood, the best articulated thoughts around how to try to control feelings and influence reality comes from 1970s film actor and my childhood hero, karate master Bruce Lee.
Lee’s fighting philosophy can be applied to life in general: “Be formless…shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You put it into a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Water can flow, or it can crash. Be water…”
When Lee fought his enemy, he used their aggressive energy against them. The angrier his opponent became, the weaker they were. The battles we will fight in life will take many forms: mental illness, disease, loss. However, it’s our core fighting philosophy that will determine our potential for coping and chances for love and happiness.
Mental health is an activity of building coping thoughts and actions which can be used to start shaping the forces of life in our favour, even in the most challenging times.
Robert Skender is a Powell River freelance writer and health commentator.
