No matter what your stance is on the state of the world these days, no matter who or what you think is right and wrong, we are in a global state of high emotional response.  And what I know as absolute truth is that the vast majority of us are not equipped to handle it.

We feel it as stress, depression, exhaustion, defensiveness, anger, aggression, etc.  And those things aren’t necessarily to be avoided — our emotions are useful to us in many ways, even the ones we consider “negative” — but pretty much everyone I know has felt a shift, and increase in intensity and frequency of these feelings.  It can’t be pinned down to one factor, one force in each individual’s personal life.  It’s just a general state of anxiety and emotional arousal which has everyone more on edge.  More fragile.

It’s more crucial than ever that we all focus not on hiding away from emotional overwhelm, but rather on building the coping skills and spiritual management techniques that we need to be able to deal with it all.  The global population is suffering in myriad ways, and whether you agree with everyone or not, our responsibility as human beings includes participating in some way to make things better.

And that means taking care of ourselves along the way.

And, frankly, I’m not convinced that withdrawal and seclusion allow anyone to effectively avoid the emotional overload we’re experiencing.

I’ve taken to more frequent regular mediation, as well as making some large-scale life adjustments to allow myself to get more involved with the world around me.  That kind of exercise seems to allow me to convert the more vague clouds of overwhelming emotional energy into something more acutely focused, something more akin to “good stress”.

Everyone’s coping mechanisms will be different.

But we’ve got to work on building and honing those skills, or even more of us won’t make it to the other side of this.