“I have to die. If it is now, well, then I die now; if later, then now I will take my lunch, since the hour for lunch has arrived — and dying I will tend to later.”
— Epictetus, quoted in A Field Guide to a Happy Life: 53 Brief Lessons for Living, by Massimo Pigliucci

“We have to take life — society and human relations — more or less as we find them. The only thing we can really make is our work. And deliberate work of the mind, imagination and hand, done, as Nietzsche said, ‘notwithstanding’, in the long run remakes the world.”

— Edmund Wilson, writing to Louise Bogan in 1937 (quoted in Vivian Gornick, Letters are Acts of Faith)

I haven’t had a chance to write much lately, but I do want to share some great online resources I’ve found useful in recent months.

When the madness of the world, the onslaught of bad news, or just the cold and dark of winter get you down, consider these two “positive psychology” podcasts as an antidote:

The Uplift podcast features interviews with a range of scientists, authors, activists and teachers who offer insight and tips on positive living and thinking. Although they seem to have stopped creating new episodes, the ones from 2017-2018 are still online and worth checking out.

The One You Feed is another podcast I really like, and it’s still producing new material. Host Eric Zimmer interviews researchers, writers and thinkers who’ve found ways to feed the so-called “good wolf” inside of us — the one that’s characterized by kindness, bravery and love, as opposed to the “bad wolf” characterized by greed, hatred and fear. According to the old parable this podcast is based on, we all have both those wolves inside us constantly battling it out. The one that wins, the story goes, is the one you feed. The podcast is free; a monthly subscription fee gets you commercial-free episodes and other bonus content.

For those interested in meditation and/or Buddhist philosophy, Dharma Seed offers thousands of free talks online on a range of topics, most from meditation teachers connected to the secular Insight Meditation Society.  Many of these are not only about personal practices that can help bring calm and wisdom, but also about key principles that can help guide our engagement with the world. Some of my favorites are from teachers like Donald Rothberg and Zohar Lavie, , who focus on service to others and the world — what’s often called “engaged Buddhism.” But there are so many great ones, it’s worth scrolling through recent titles and just seeing what interests you.

I direct a program for a human rights organization, and while there are plenty of good and worthwhile things about the work, there’s also a lot of bureaucracy.

I don’t just have to do my job, but I have to report what I’m doing and what I’ve got to show for it. There are the weekly check-ins, the quarterly board reports, the accounting for my budget, etc.

I understand that an organization needs to keep track of what its employees are doing and their results, but it takes time, effort, and thought. It’s a commitment.

The problem may not be so much that I’ve had to keep checking in to others, but that I haven’t made an equal commitment to checking in with myself. I’ve gotten so focused on meeting other peoples’ expectations that I’ve forgotten to regularly consider and pursue some of my interests, goals and intentions. I’ve let things that are important to me – both people and activities – fall away. Feeling overwhelmed by responsibilities, I’ve come to see many things I enjoy as what I’ll do when I retire and have more time.

Well, for better or worse, I’m not retiring anytime soon. But human rights advocacy  isn’t the only thing I care about, and it’s not something I can do all the time.

Recently, I was speaking to a group of interns seeking career advice on working in human rights and social justice. One of them asked how I keep doing this without getting so discouraged or depressed by it that I give up. She described how even over the course of her summer internship, she was finding it difficult to read all the e-mails that fill her office inbox daily with stories of human rights abuses around the world. And she wondered if she’d have the stamina to work for years being bombarded by all that bad news.

“How do you do it?” she asked.

“I don’t read those e-mails,” I answered.

I don’t have to. I’m not responsible for knowing every bad thing going on everywhere all the time. And if I did read them all, I’d be too depressed, outraged or traumatized to actually do my job. Even keeping up with the catalog of horrors I’m responsible for responding to can be mentally and emotionally exhausting. I have to put limits on it. All advocates do.

That’s why check-ins with yourself are so important. Are you nurturing the different facets of your life – physical, intellectual, creative, emotional, and inter-personal? Are you engaging in activities and interacting with people that bring you joy?

Reflecting on the past year, I’ve let a lot of those things slip in my own life. I’m not doing many of the things I used to enjoy or spending enough time with people who are important to me.

So I need to recalibrate, to recommit to those areas of my life and make time for them, even if it means I spend a few hours less working each week. I know that if I do nurture other aspects of my life, the time I spend at work will also be more productive. (Tony Schwartz, founder  and CEO of The Energy Project, has written a lot about this.)

As summer comes to a close, this a good time to consider, where is your life out of balance? And what new commitments do you want to make?

I finally quit my job. I’d been thinking about it for years, and I always thought that when I finally did it, I’d be relishing the act:  telling my boss and coworkers with a big toothy smile, posting it on Facebook with lots of happy exclamation points.

Instead, when it came time to actually make a move, I felt sick to my stomach.  I don’t mean just butterflies, I mean it felt like big fat rodents were wrestling in there. Which made me wonder: Was I doing the right thing?  People often say “trust your gut,” but what if your gut feels like it’s gnawing at itself?

In my case, I had a good job offer, so it wasn’t like I was being rash and taking some huge financial risk. I was actually going to be earning more money.  But I still felt sick over the change.

Feeling anxious in itself is no reason not to do something.  Your gut isn’t always going to feel good, and any big move can provoke anxiety.  There’s nothing wrong with that. When I finally realized that, I actually just let myself feel sick. I even shared that fact with my boss when I told him I was leaving.  He was perfectly understanding.  It’s a difficult decision.

When I finally got all the awkward conversations with colleagues over with, I felt much better.  I now feel completely confident that I did the right thing, and I’m excited to be moving on to something new.  But it didn’t feel that way until after I’d done it.

Modern culture offers us so many ways to manage our anxiety that it’s easy to feel like there’s something wrong if despite all of that, we still feel anxious.  Do I just need to take another yoga class, or meditate, or go for a run? Do I need medication? Or am I just doing the wrong thing?

Anxiety is actually a perfectly normal response to uncertainty.  All those stress-management techniques aren’t actually designed to get rid of anxiety, but to help us manage it wisely.  Meditation or yoga won’t magically tell me what’s the best move to secure my unknown future, but it can help me slow down enough to become aware of what exactly I’m afraid of, what my options are, and what’s important for me to consider in order to make a wise decision. It still may feel really hard to act, because the outcome will always be, to some extent, uncertain.

Buddhists sometimes talk about the heart-mind as being the center of our being, rather than the mind alone. Ancient Egyptians also believed the heart was the source of the soul and of memory, emotions and personality.  The heart is something we still associate with our deepest emotions and values, like love, affection and friendship. To me, the heart-mind idea helps gets me out of my purely rational thinking, since my logical mind can sometimes rationalize all my options, and then I feel stuck. Connecting to what I deeply value seems to me an important way of guiding and grounding major decisions. All those stress management techniques are ways of slowing down our ping-ponging thoughts enough to allow us to make that connection.

That’s different than just “going with your gut,” because our stomach is a place where we tend to feel much of our anxiety. If you avoid anything that seems to disturb your gut, you could end up in a very tiny and constricted place.

Social science research conducted by University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt backs up the idea that we probably ought to be taking more risks that we tend to, and that people who say “yes” to new opportunities rather than “no” tend to be happier. “As a basic rule of thumb, I believe that people are too cautious when it comes to making a change,” Levitt says. As American Enterprise Institute president Arthur C. Brooks put it in a recent New York Times column: “Our sin tends to be timidity, not rashness.”

Of course, some people’s sin is rashness (witness our president threatening nuclear war on Twitter), and I’m certainly not advocating that. Weigh your options, consider the risks, and connect to what’s most important to you. You may still feel fear about your decision, and that’s okay. If your heart-mind is good with it, don’t let the churning in your gut keep you from taking the plunge.

One of the hardest things about change can be acknowledging the need to make it. And that’s often because we blame ourselves for the predicament we’re in, and for not having changed already.  The pain of that self-judgment can make it nearly impossible to look honestly at our behavior and how we might do things differently.

That’s why I really appreciated Richard Friedman’s article, What Cookies and Meth Have in Common. It’s all about how the combination of our environment and our brains set the perfect stage for addiction — and all sorts of other self-destructive behaviors. That we eat too many cookies or drink too much wine or lash out in anger under stress isn’t our fault, in a sense.  These sorts of habits are what our brains naturally do:  seek comfort or “reward” of some sort when under stress.  And since our society sanctions and even encourages all sorts of destructive habits, whether by companies selling “comfort food” or cocktails, or by leaders modeling rage-filled behavior, it’s not surprising our brains give in to those.  Once we start down that path, though, it can be harder and harder to stop.

That’s because, as Friedman explains, our brains produce dopamine, which conveys a sense of pleasure in response to immediate “rewards” like sex, food, money and drugs. But the more we have those rewards, the more the brain needs them to experience even a normal, healthy dose of pleasure.  Ordinary pleasures that don’t include the addictive substance become harder to appreciate.  Our brains literally lose their pleasure receptors.

Although we don’t normally think of anger as addictive in this way, it can be, because it can feel good in the moment and give us a fleeting illusion of power and control.

Whatever the behavior, it can become automatic, not because we’re morally flawed, but because our brains are operating according to an ingrained pattern. The key to breaking that pattern is first to become aware of it, and then to consciously create new, healthier alternative patterns of behavior that serve us better.

None of this is particularly new or surprising.  But I’m repeatedly struck by how difficult people find it even to acknowledge their own unhealthy patterns of behavior.  And I think it’s because we blame ourselves for them, and that’s extremely painful. Continuing the behavior allows us to avoid that pain.

What Friedman’s and other research shows is that none of this is our “fault” in any moral sense. A combination of stressful conditions in our environment and easy access to an immediate unhealthy “reward” can lead us quickly down the road to addiction.

Although some people are more genetically predisposed to certain kinds of addictions than others, and at this point there’s little we can do to change that, we can change our environments in critical ways that encourage us to make healthier choices.

Obvious stress reducers include exercise, meditation and yoga, for example. And we can consciously limit our access to addictive and unhealthy substances.

But one often-overlooked way of reducing the stress that sustains our unwanted behaviors is simply to recognize that the behavior itself is not a moral flaw or defect. We are not to blame. It’s simply a brain pattern. By recognizing and acknowledging it, and then paying careful attention to how we react to our environment and doing our best to create a healthier one, even our brain patterns become something we can change.

There are many things we cannot control. We can, however, exercise much more control over one thing: where we place our attention. Do we allow it to be seized by someone else’s agenda, or do we set our own? Are we distracted by every bit of bad news that flashes across our screens, or do we concentrate on doing and creating something good?

We all want to do something something important, to make a contribution. As the Dalai Lama and the head of the American Enterprise Institute put it recently, we all want to feel useful. It’s a basic human need. But one of the challenges of modern life is we’re constantly distracted from even considering what we can usefully do by the endless barrage of news, ads, and other shiny objects that seem to demand our attention.

Some of these things can seem very important. For example, lately I’ve been avidly following the new president-elect’s picks for his future cabinet — the people (mostly older white men) he’s chosen to control the various agencies that run the functions of our government. (I do believe it’s ours, even though we often feel helpless to have any influence over it.)  And I’ve spent a lot of time angry and upset.

How can he pick the head of a global oil company with huge business interests in Russia to be the next Secretary of State?  How can he pick a climate change denier to run the Environmental Protection Agency?  The list goes on and on.

In fact, I have no ability to control who Donald Trump picks to fill his cabinet or to advise him or even to sit on the Supreme Court (God forbid). I can participate in the political process once he makes those appointments, urging members of Congress to reject his choices, for example, if that seems possible or appropriate. But the vast amount of time I spend following the news sites reporting on his latest picks — or statements, or tweets, or lies — is really a waste of my time. I don’t really believe that knowing Trump’s latest moves within hours or even moments of his publicizing them will give me any more ability to respond effectively. In fact, I’m starting to get the feeling that the more I allow my mind to be consumed by this whirlwind of toxins, and my rage and fear to be stoked by it, the less effective I’m likely to be — at anything.

Rage and fear are what got us into this mess: it’s what led a surprisingly large number of people to vote for a candidate that encouraged and played upon those emotions. I don’t really want to follow in their footsteps.

For me to be effective — politically, and also personally, in all the other areas of my life that are important to me — I need to stay informed, but also to keep some distance. I need to refrain from following it all so closely that my entire focus becomes on things I don’t need to know, about which I have no control, and which only feed my anger and sense of despair. I need to maintain enough space between myself and “the news” — which is largely defined by others — so that I can develop and maintain my own sense of what’s important, what I want to know about, and what I can do and can contribute. How can I be useful, what do I have to offer, in the midst of all the anger and fear and craziness — and in the midst of all the well-meaning, hard-working, good people I see around me? How can I keep at least some of my focus on all the possibilities to do good that still exist, even as I feel sad and frustrated at the direction I see my federal government taking?

I think this is a central question for many of us right now. It’s a hard question, and one that’s easy to avoid by staying focused on the daily alarm bells. But it’s important to answer, so we don’t look back later and see we were squandering our opportunities by reacting impulsively instead of responding deliberately. And answering it begins, I believe, with being more conscious and careful about where we place our attention.