Why must one invest in Mental Fitness now?

As the COVID cases surge in the world again, the patterns we first encountered at the beginning of the pandemic are coming back. Some parts of the world are going into lockdown again, while others are enforcing them partially. There is a familiar sense of the unknown, yet again, and anxiety levels are increasing exponentially fast - much like the COVID cases in any given part of the world. 

It seems funny to even consider that just a few weeks ago, it seemed like everything may become calm, after all.

I for one, am dreading this, not because I can’t keep up with the demands of working through the COVID pandemic, but because this will have a spiraling effect on much of the community that I work with and support.

As the years have passed I have known one thing dearly, and I have learnt it well - don’t get too attached to anything, for everything has a time limit. 

Mind you, I don’t mean that in the “stoic” sense of the term. I have learnt it the hard way that things change, even when we don’t want them to - or perhaps especially when we don’t want them to. 

How can we retain composure in the face of a reality that constantly eludes our grasp like quicksand?

I would like to offer an answer that I’ve arrived at, over years of experience: mental fitness.

Mental fitness is not mental health, which is more about being in touch with your needs and being able to articulate them well.

Mental fitness is about being able to process the changing nature of reality in time to be able to keep up with it.

At some point, there were horse-drawn carriages. Much later, there were vehicles. The pace of technological change used to be slow and steady.

But over the course of the last couple of decades, so many technological changes have happened - we had the landline, then the boxed cellular phone which could barely be carried anywhere, and then there were phones with sleek buttons, and then flip phones, and so on and on to what we have today!

I have seen all of these changes happen in my lifetime, and never have I been so stunned! 

And even as I write this, I’m sure yet another innovation is just waiting to happen - and I know I will be stunned when I see it, yet again.

In this context, mental agility would mean not being attached to the landline. Mental agility would mean seeing, decades ago, that DVDs, the heftier counterpart to CDs, were no match for pen drives, which were later no match for SD cards - and so on.

In other words, it would simply mean: keeping up with the times, no matter how fast it moves.

Because yet again we all have to struggle to wrap our head around the fact that what we had thought was gone has returned, with what appears to be a vengeance.

Let’s try to remind ourselves that we are all on the same boat and that no matter how rocky the journey gets, there is always another day to be lived tomorrow - even if it is very far from what we imagine it to be.