Monthly Archives: November 2020

Most of us associate confetti with some sort of celebration like a parade or wedding. However, Brigid Schulte, author of Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time, uses the term ‘time confetti’ to describe all the small scraps of free time she experienced in a day. Most of us can identify with this. Rather than having clearly distinguishable periods of free time, we tend to use free time like confetti. Five minutes here, ten minutes there and, more often than not, we even spend those precious little moments glued to the screen of a phone, tablet, or laptop. No wonder we end up feeling overwhelmed, overstimulated, and fragmented. The long blocks of free time that we used to enjoy a couple of years ago are now constantly interrupted. Multitasking and mobile technologies can be a lethal combination with regard to our well-being, if we are not careful.

A tell-tale sign that we are using confetti time is our inability to be fully present and enjoy the moment. Often a dinner, a birthday party, a vacation, a movie, playing golf, or whatever we do to relax becomes just another piece of confetti in our otherwise crazy world of busyness. We are not fully present, let alone enjoying these moments, because in the back of our mind there are other duties calling for our attention. Instead of having meaningful time off with friends and family, an alert that we receive from work creates guilt and dread over what we’re not getting done. Mothers often feel torn, trying to be a committed parent and a good employee at the same time. Thinking about work while trying to relax induces panic and anxiety, and sadly, that robs us of certain never-to-be-repeated special moments, all because we settled for confetti time.

We need to become more deliberate in creating and valuing our free time. We need to recognize and overcome the time traps in our lives, and we need to intentionally carve out happier and more meaningful moments each day. The old excuse of not having time to relax is not true. The truth is that it is not a priority, and if it is not a priority, then confetti time is what we settle for to the detriment of our own well-being.

So how do we change that?

It will take some effort, much like trying to get fit. It calls for discipline and small, deliberate steps. We need to consciously build free time into our day, and to hold ourselves to it. No more confetti time. No more five minutes here and ten minutes there. No more guilt and anxiety around these moments. Free time is our gift to ourselves. Let us claim it.

“Either you run the day, or the day runs you.”

Jim Rohn

Most of us do not regard ourselves as dancers. Yet, in a sense, we are all dancers on the stage of our life. There are interesting similarities between the requirements for becoming a professional dancer and dancing on the stage of our life. Both require us to be dedicated to dancing, to be able to persevere and to have physical stamina. We must be flexible, agile and graceful, and able and willing to form part of troupe of dancers. Dancers are also subjected to prolonged, irregular and taxing working schedules, and must pay constant attention to their diet, fitness and health.

This year has proved to be a particularly challenging year for all of us on the dancefloor of life. Earlier this year the music we had been used to dancing to suddenly changed. Our familiar dance routine was disrupted, and we were forced to adapt to new music and to a new style of dancing. When the storm of the pandemic hit us earlier this year, we abruptly went from a fast-paced cha-cha to a slow dance. As the storm now slowly seems to be subsiding, the destruction it has caused is becoming more and more evident. Millions have lost their jobs and their income, and even those who have been fortunate enough to have escaped this, have had to adapt to a world that has changed dramatically. Things are simply not the same anymore. The music and the dance have changed inexorably, and we are being challenged to master new dance steps and new rhythms. This causes huge uncertainty and anxiety. For some, this is too overwhelming: they cannot hear the music, and thus simply stop dancing altogether.

Life is an easy dance when things are going great for us. We gracefully glide across the dancefloor with ease and poise and laughter; but to keep on dancing when our lives are turned upside-down takes some doing. When a storm is raging, and we are riddled by anxiety and fear, it can be hard to hear any music, and the last thing on our mind is to dance. Yet, the secret seems to be that it is exactly during a time like this, that we should try our best to find the beat, and then to start dancing fiercely, because hard times require fierce dancing. As Purvi Raniga wrote: “Some days we have to just learn to pick up the broken pieces and start dancing again. Difficulties are there but these difficulties do not define your art of being fully alive.” Or as Vivian Green suggested: “Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to be over, it’s about learning how to dance in the rain.” 

How do we do that? Stop fighting the storm. It is what it is. Welcome it. Learn from it. Whatever your situation is, trust that it is what you need to experience now. Storms are personal growth accelerators. Never has a smooth sea made a skilled sailor. In every storm, there is a gift of new possibilities, with new music and a new style of dance waiting to be discovered. But this is impossible, if we remain stuck in the past, or if we feel sorry for ourselves, and just want things to be the way they were. Rather learn to dance in the rain, knowing that this showed up in your life for a reason. The question is not whether the storm will pass, because it always does. The question is what we have learned about ourselves and life in general while the storm was raging. We can use this opportunity to ask ourselves whether we will be better equipped when the next storm arrives. The more storms we face, the more we grow; the more we grow, the more resourceful we become the more resourceful we become, the less we fear the storm. Eventually, we can become so good at this that, when a storm is bearing down on us, we embrace it, even welcome it, and start dancing. By then, we may have learned that the secret to surviving any storm is not to tap into fear and anxiety, but to tune into the song of our soul. Not even the fiercest storm can drown that out. This is what keeps us dancing and, as Dahi Tamara Koch says, “dancing makes your soul grow its own pair of wings”.

If you find it hard to dance at the moment, try to make the time to reconnect with your soul. Become still. Hear the beating of your heart. The heart is the seat of the soul. And when you can hear or feel your heart beating, know that you are loved and taken care of. Let it remind you, that this beat, this beating heart, has always been there, through every storm you have gone through. Just connect with it again, pick up the beat and start dancing – fiercely and fearlessly. Your soul will grow you a pair of wings.

“There are those who dance to the rhythm that is played to them, those who only dance to their own rhythm, and those who don’t dance at all.”

Jose Bergamin

In 1967, two behavioural psychologists, Martin Seligman and Steven Maier, conducted the following experiment to research animal behaviour: they put dogs in an enclosure without a roof and subdivided into two parts by a low wall. The floor on the one half of the enclosure emitted light electric shocks – just enough to be unpleasant to encourage the dogs to jump over the wall to the other side of the enclosure to escape. The dogs did just that. In another part of the experiment they strapped some dogs into a harness and repeated the experiment. At first, the dogs tried to jump away to avoid the shock; but since they were strapped into the harness, they could not escape. Later, even when these dogs were released from their harness and given the possibility of jumping over the wall and escaping from the shock, these dogs laid down and passively accepted the shock treatment without even trying to escape. This is a heart-breaking image. These dogs had learned that nothing that they did would allow them to escape from the shock treatment —so they gave up even trying. This type of behaviour is called ‘learned helplessness.’ Learned helplessness occurs when an individual continuously faces a negative, uncontrollable situation and ultimately stops trying to change his/her circumstances, even when it is possible to do so. They simply stop trying to change their situation.

This also explains why people tend to stay in abusive relationships, or why people find it so hard to give up smoking. After trying everything, they come to believe that nothing they do will help, and therefore they stop trying altogether. They feel that they have no control and thus become passive. This feeling of helplessness can lead to depression and anxiety because someone may believe that nothing will end their suffering, so they completely stop seeking help. Learned helplessness typically manifests as a lack of self-esteem, low motivation and low perseverance, which then reinforces their belief that they are inept, and a failure. Times are tough at the moment, and many people feel that they have no control over their lives. They feel overwhelmed, drained, and lack the energy to keep on trying. They feel helpless and buy into it.

There is good news though.

Seligman later did a bold revision of his theory and came up with what he calls ‘learned optimism’, which can have huge implications for how we understand ourselves. According to him, we become victims of learned helplessness because of a mistaken belief that we should be able to handle life’s knocks, because we all have this inherent ability. Not so, says Seligman. As babies, we are all initially helpless. Feeling helpless and out of control is our default state.Taking control of our lives and developing hopeful feelings is something that we must learn and practice and protect within ourselves. We must learn to take control of our lives rather than trying to control life. When we are in control of our lives, we can dust ourselves off when we are knocked down, and we can try again and again, because we refuse to see ourselves as helpless. The truth is that every hard knock we survive instils within us a sense of achievement and hopefulness. Over time, our self-confidence and self-belief become so strong that the word ‘helplessness’ disappears from our vocabulary. Then optimism becomes our natural way of being, because we have freed ourselves from the harness of helplessness.

This is something that all parents should take seriously. An important role of parenting and education is to teach kids to take control of their own lives, to see their problems as surmountable, so that, by the time they are adults, they see themselves as the determiners of their own destiny and not as helpless victims. We do not simply fail children through neglect or abuse — we can also fail them by preventing them from ever facing the world. Molly-coddling, suffocating, and over-protecting our children is the breeding ground for learned helplessness and passivity. Instead, we need to allow and even encourage them to enter the school of hard knocks. When they are knocked down, we can then help them to get up and allow them to try again and again, watching with delight how their optimism grows.

I’m not interested in blind optimism, but I’m very interested in optimism that is hard-won, that takes on darkness and then says, ‘This is not enough.’

Colum McCann

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