about

Opportunities for spiritual practice in every day life.

"Living in Spirit" appears monthly in the Daily Review.
Here you can find an archive of past columns.

Wednesday, February 19, 2025

How We Hold On In Discouraging Times

from the Smart Anglers Notebook by Carl Richardson, illustrated by Ted Walke
While stopped for a travel break at the Pennsylvania visitor’s center, we found a display about ice fishing, including a description of how to make and use your own ice awls. The helpful illustrations showed how, if you fell through the ice, you could use the awls by driving each spike into the ice, pulling yourself out of the water and onto the ice, and then rolling to safer ice. Though I will probably never do any ice fishing myself, I was so impressed by the clear instructions and practicality that I grabbed a flier on my way out.

Later on that evening, the family was talking about Habitat For Humanity’s first ever 3d printed house. We were charmed by the idea- how pretty the house had looked, how quickly it had been built. “Maybe this could make a real difference,” said someone hopefully. A young person in my family expressed a long-time frustration that no matter how many small improvements we make, great suffering continues. We offered examples of big changes in the world, like in the fight against Malaria and AIDS, but he countered with the big persistent problems of our time. He's right of course. There are many people suffering right at this moment. And some of that suffering could be relieved if we came together a did all we could, yet the great problems persist.

It's important to look critically and realistically at the problems of our world. But when we do, it is easy to sink into despair. “Despair” I offered “can be a slippery slope. We can always come up with more and more reasons to feed our despair, and once we begin, it has a kind of addictive quality and a limitless appetite. It sucks us in. In my experience, despair is not helpful.” I grasped around for a metaphor. “These little bits of good news, like the Habitat for Humanity houses, they are like the points in the ice awls. We grab on to them to pull ourselves out of despair, so that we can roll to safer ice.” Once we have pulled ourselves out of the suck of despair, then we can look for solutions, and do whatever things we can do to make life better for all we touch.

Our spiritual practices can be like those ice awls. When I feel the pull of despair, they anchor me in whatever solid ground I can find. One practice I use is looking for what my teacher Brook Thomas calls “basic goodness”- by which she means not necessarily something that feels good (it can be hard to find anything that makes us feel good when we are truly discouraged) but any ordinary sort of neutral feeling. If I am having one of those days when “everything hurts” I might notice that actually the tops of my feet feel neutral. If my worries are weighing me down, I notice those basic things I don’t often pay attention to; right now I am in a dry, warm room with working electricity that powers my computer and a nearby lamp. I have a full belly and am able to breathe without effort. I hear the sounds of my housemates and neighbors. All of those ordinary good things are like the solid ground on which we can anchor ourselves. Even if, say, your heating goes out, or you have a respiratory illness that makes breathing onerous, we can shift our anchor to some other basic goodness- the people who will answer if I reach out to them, the solidity of the comfy chair that holds me up, the warm blanket I wrap myself in.

I believe that there is a basic goodness that is deeper and larger than all the troubles of the world. One of the most important practices that sustain us in unstable times is to remember and connect to this deeper goodness. I encourage you to locate or build your own “Spiritual Awls,” and keep them handy whenever you notice yourself sinking towards despair. This is one of the reasons for spiritual practice, so that we can anchor ourselves in what is good, what is enduring, even in challenging times. Anchored in basic goodness we are able to see the beauty in even the coldest winter, and to help and support one another from that stable ground.