“The pandemic has hijacked the circumstances of our lives—that’s the reality we can’t avoid. But our minds and our reactions are still our own.” Ancient philosophers, Stoics, can teach us much about our need to embrace the unknown; in fact, we may be better off accepting the inherent uncertainty in pandemic life instead of fighting an ongoing battle against it. “Change what we can, accept what we cannot.”
Preparing Your Mind for Uncertain Times
What about the darker kind of uncertainty, the kind many of us are facing now? Not only the immediate suffering of illness and job loss caused by the pandemic, but its open-ended nature. We don’t know when it will end. You might have noticed that this kind of uncertainty-let’s call it malign uncertainty-tends to make bad moods worse.
