Now is the winter of our... ?
“It will continue to be bumpy through to Christmas and it may even by bumpy beyond…”
- BoJo. Oct, 2020.
The nights are closing in, new restrictions are being introduced, and what seems like the only certainty we can allow ourselves is that “things will be bumpy through to Christmas”. It can feel very much like having survived one wave through sheer energy and ingenuity, we are now faced with having to pull more of it out of the bag to get through another six months. BoJo had his clenched little fists on the pulse when he said he knew the people were feeling '“furious and fatigued”.
How can we begin to think about the winter to come in a way that will see us through? I for one can’t be furious and fatigued for the rest of the year.
Let’s jump back in time briefly, if we dare, to March 2020. The lockdown is announced and the world shuts down. We find ourselves confined to our homes. A pandemic sweeps the world. We drink, we watch Netflix, we queue for toilet paper outside Tesco and we wait to see if Rishi Sunak will acknowledge the existence of whichever industry we’re in. How did you see this at the time? How did you see yourself in the middle of it all? What did you do, and what was the result of that? I know of some people for whom it quickly became an opportunity to take on personal projects which they would never have the time for otherwise. They saw themselves as students once more, with the space and privacy to learn something new again. For others the lockdown demanded that they change how they work and where. They saw themselves as some sort of Arctic explorer suddenly alone on an ice sheet and needing to move quickly to survive. I remember experiencing a bit of both. Elements of optimism and terror. I was undertaking a diploma at the time and I saw it as an opportunity to focus on that fully in a way I wouldn’t have been able to if I was continuing with the acting work I had on at the time. Looking back now from the viewpoint of Oct 2020, I have a new interpretation of it all. I now see it as an imposed but necessary period of reflection and a lesson in patience. I was trying out new things and those long Spring days gave me the time and space to really get an idea on where I was headed and what really mattered to me about it. What’s the story you told yourself of the crisis when it hit, and what’s the story you tell yourself about it now?
Story and meaning.
Narrative Psychology posits the idea that we experience ourselves as characters in our own stories. We are hardwired to create interpretations of what is happening around us and link them togther in a context that will give us a sense of continuum. I’m from here, I do this, I love these things, that happened to me and now I’m this way, which has implications for what I think the future will look like for me. We are constatnly writing and re-writing narratives for our experience of ourselves and the world as we move through it. We can’t not do this. Ask yourself what story you are creating now about your experience of reading this? What meaning have you given this blog? What’s your picture of me? How do you relate to both me, these ideas and your own? It’s not a question as to whether we choose to create narratives or not, given that we will, the question is how do we form theses narratives and how can we change them?
Story and behaviour.
How we view ourselves, others and the world we live is directly linked to what we will then do and not do. How we view our past, and the stories we have created about it, have a direct impact on what we see as possible in our future. After all we need some form of consistency. This is one of the requirements of having a ‘self’, a Me that I am, that I can rely on being familiar and knowable. The Me that has a specific set of likes and dislikes, strengths and weakness. Using this idea we make assumptions of what’s possible or probable for ourselves and what isn’t. Let your mind throw out five endings to the following sentence: 'Traditionally, I’m not the kind of person who normally…’ This view of yourself may have been true in the past. Maybe you haven’t traditionally been great at networking, or singing, or structuring your time, but notice how this view of your past self has the direct effect on how you see yourself being in the future and your choices in the present. I have given myself no timeframe for writing this, and as a result it’s unlikely I’ll be cleaning the bathroom today. This is a story that repeats, until I change the narrative that I’m not great with structuring my time.
Story and change.
When we behave ‘out of character’ or even consider doing so, we experience a type of psychological stress known as cognitive dissonance. Our view of who we are pushes back at the idea that it might be other than it is. And so change must be incremental and experimental if we are to coax our self-concept into trying out a new narrative. We need to test the waters playfully and allow our sense of ourselves to expand over time and with new information. One very powerful way of approaching this is through the narrative perspective. Knowing how intertwined our experience, identity, story, behaviour and eventual outcomes are, shifting the narrative we are creating can result in a far reaching ripple effect, at multiple levels and areas of our lives. What’s the story you’re telling yourself about the approaching winter? How useful is it to what you ultimately want to do or be? What would be a more useful narrative, given who and where you want to be? A key element about creating new narratives that involve personal change is that we can structure them around a chosen goal, or way of being. This ties in all of our actions, thinking, sense of ourselves and the world around us and shifts it towards a desired outcome.
Here’s a structured sequence of questions that can be used to unpick a narrative and devise a new alternative.
Reflecting on your narrative of the first wave:
What did you experience?
What were you telling yourself at the time?
What does this say about how you see yourself?
What did you do as a result?
What happened in the end?
An alternative narrative for the winter:
Where would you like to be at the end of this winter?
What could you do differently this time?
What would you need to shift in how you see yourself?
What could you tell yourself about this winter to enable this?
What would your experience of the coming months be if you followed this narrative?
The world is far from being within our control. There’s strong arguments against seeking control of it in the first place. Our interpretation of what happens to us and our chosen reactions are very much ‘self-authored’ and the narrative we create frequently has a smack of the self-fulfilling prophecy to it. But looked at through the lens of what you want to try and create, this narrative perspective is a powerful one. It offers us the possibility of considering other ways of being and doing that meet the current crisis and leads us in the direction of, and to outcomes of, our own choosing.
Now is the winter of our… (I invite you to fill in the rest yourself).
“We make sense, or fail to make sense, of our lives by the kind of story we can or cannot tell about it.”
Jospeh Dunne