Soaring energy prices, war in Ukraine, heat waves in Europe and floods in Pakistan, new corona virus variants and and … and. A lot of really bad things happened and continue to happen. More and more people around us complain about today and worry about the future. Strangely if you ask people whether they would prefer to live in the world of the 2000s, the 1970s, the 1950s or even the 1920s, most prefer the world as it is today. So how can we deal with this anxiety that overwhelms us? How can one get the hope that makes the present inhabitable?

Rather than spiralling into doom scenarios with anxious pessimistic others, one should reflect with others who offer us new inspirational thoughts, motivate us through recognition and social control and help us to cross barriers. If those others are not available at anxious moments, take a distance to yourself, look out of the window observe a robin hopping from branch to branch, appreciate the small joys the world is offering us.

Just complaining about high energy prices, the war in Ukraine and climate change or any other bad thing that happened to us will not help, we need to work with those events and facts. There is the saying “change starts in your head” but I believe it starts once you get your bum out of the chair. Any action intending to do better is better than none. We do not know what will work, but unless we act we will never learn. As Rebecca Solnit wrote in Hope in Dark Times: “Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and in that spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act”. It is the future’s uncertainty that opens new opportunities and pathways.

Bad things always happen but they come to an end. Even at the dead end of a tunnel is light if one keeps shovelling.

Yours MBA Captain Boris