Some Good Things - A Deecoded Life

In these trying times, it’s easy to slip into what Harvard Business Review has classified as grief.

Yes, we’re also feeling anticipatory grief. Anticipatory grief is that feeling we get about what the future holds when we’re uncertain. Usually it centers on death. We feel it when someone gets a dire diagnosis or when we have the normal thought that we’ll lose a parent someday. Anticipatory grief is also more broadly imagined futures. There is a storm coming. There’s something bad out there. With a virus, this kind of grief is so confusing for people. Our primitive mind knows something bad is happening, but you can’t see it. This breaks our sense of safety. We’re feeling that loss of safety. I don’t think we’ve collectively lost our sense of general safety like this. Individually or as smaller groups, people have felt this. But all together, this is new. We are grieving on a micro and a macro level.
That Discomfort You’re Feeling is Grief, Harvard Business Review

I’m glad my friend AA shared this article with me, because it definitely explained how I felt the previous weeks thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic. Different people handle grief differently – for me there was a lot of sadness and anxiety, and the article had a paragraph on how to handle that.

Anticipatory grief is the mind going to the future and imagining the worst. To calm yourself, you want to come into the present. This will be familiar advice to anyone who has meditated or practiced mindfulness but people are always surprised at how prosaic this can be. You can name five things in the room. There’s a computer, a chair, a picture of the dog, an old rug, and a coffee mug. It’s that simple. Breathe. Realize that in the present moment, nothing you’ve anticipated has happened. In this moment, you’re okay. You have food. You are not sick. Use your senses and think about what they feel. The desk is hard. The blanket is soft. I can feel the breath coming into my nose. This really will work to dampen some of that pain.

Of course it’s not always that easy to come to the present, so I also do my tried-and-tested method: distraction. I achieve this by watching feel-good shows and films, and seeking out good news while avoiding the bad. John Krasinski definitely had a great idea when he put up a YouTube channel that highlights some good news around the world. You can watch its first episode below.

Of course it also helps to stay in touch with your loved ones. Like most (old) millennials, I usually only chatted through text, but because of people posting about their e-numan sessions and video calls, my long distance friends and I realised – hey, we can do that, too! It’s like actually hanging out with them. Why didn’t we think of this before? Sheesh.

It’s also important to check up on all of your close friends because you don’t know if one of them actually caught the dreaded virus and just didn’t want to worry you and never said anything.

This actually happened to me – I found out yesterday that one of my close friends had been in the hospital for 18 days and only told his family. He is fine now and will be released later this week.

While talking to him, I jokingly scolded, “Why didn’t you tell us? What if you had died and we never even got to say goodbye?” We laughed about it (we have dark humour, I know) but it made me realise that I don’t want that to happen with anyone, so now I am making it a point to check up on all my close friends.

One thing I am also trying to put more effort into is helping others who are more affected by this virus – like those people whose incomes have been affected – in my own very small way, like by tipping service industry people even though Singapore doesn’t have a tipping culture.

We don’t know when this will end but if we focus on some good things, it won’t be as bad.