LAST Friday (January 27) was Holocaust Memorial Day. Not the cheeriest of subjects for a column intended to be about finding joy in life. But unless we can look at the worst it’s hard to really appreciate the best.
The Holocaust and its wider effects is personal to me. Czeslaw Stepek, born and raised in the same little village in Poland as my grandfather, died in Auschwitz in 1942. He wasn’t Jewish, but a Polish resistance activist. If the Germans had captured my grandfather, he’d have been sent there too, for the same reason. So when I visited Auschwitz I had a name and a village, two real things to focus on when the sheer scale of the atrocities threatened to make the experience a numbing abstraction.
I do talks from time to time on this grim subject. I tell the story of what happened to my Polish family during the war but I also explain the beautiful kindness of strangers during those times.
As an example, most people know that six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust but hardly anyone knows that the mayor and archbishop of the Greek island of Zante, also known as Zakynthos, refused to give up their Jewish fellow citizens, risking their own lives in the process. When asked to provide a list of all the Jews resident on the island, the two leaders wrote only their own names. The Jews of Zante survived.
On December 6, 1941, a young woman on a Russian train threw my aunt a loaf of bread. My aunt was 14, recently released from the Gulag and with her mother, my father and her other sister, trying to find how to escape Stalin’s reach. They hadn’t eaten for days, were nearing starvation, and my grandmother could no longer stand.
If it hadn’t been for that lady's kindness, my father’s family would have died of hunger. They made that loaf last for days; it was all the food they had. A loaf of bread. It was like being given treasure. But the real treasure was the kindness.
Once again we live in uncertain times. Change is very unpredictable and often fast-moving. Few predicted the fall of communism in 1989 let alone the end of the Soviet Union. Not many thought Nelson Mandela would be released and apartheid in South Africa ended. Who predicted peace in Northern Ireland?
Now we have Trump, Islamic State and a resurgent extreme right in Europe. How do we deal with all this?
The practice of mindfulness says: first, just notice. Notice how we actually respond in real time to these events, moment by moment.
The most common mental reactions are likely to be fear, anger, worry, intolerance to those who express views contrary to our own, and derision of such people’s opinions.
Notice these responses inside yourself. Don’t try to justify them or judge them. Just pay attention to what they actually feel like, and any associated responses in your body, such as a tightening of the shoulders or fist-clenching in anger.
Unless we make the effort to see these feelings and responses in real life, we implicitly accept and justify our thoughts and endure our bodies' responses. Yet usually those responses are unhelpful – and unhealthy. Expressing views without forethought is unhelpful: when they're expressed to people who agree with us, no change is accomplished; if it is to those with opposing views, our negativity, anger or derision only serves to further polarise. It is unhealthy because these negative emotions cause hormonal reactions in the body which speed up the wearing out of our organs and cells, while draining us of our everyday energy. Hardly a great set of results are they?
But I’m not arguing for political passivity. Instead, try two mindful practices.
Try to genuinely notice what you and most of your fellow citizens have, despite all the change in the air. A roof over your head, food in the fridge, a bed, central heating. My grandmother died of starvation. She would be ecstatic to have what you have. Try to feel that gulf between your everyday life and hers, and see if gratitude can seep into you. Nurture that every morning when you wake up. “I am grateful for my bed, my pillow, my duvet, my house.” This gets your mind in a truer context.
Secondly, take some time to think deeply about what you actually want your society to be. Then consider, given what is available, what you could actually do to helping society move in that direction. You can nurture that commitment when you wake up, after expressing gratitude for what you have. “Today I am going to try to help move my society to a better space with any opportunity I find.” Then go and do it when you can.
This is a two-pronged approach. The first puts you in a stronger, more constructive frame of mind, and reawakens pure awareness of all that society has achieved so far. The second aims to take you out of “moaning but doing nothing” mode to a practical activist state.
So in these troubled times, see that good still exists all around you, notice the reality of unhelpful negativity in your mind, turn it into a positive practical, "doing" mindset, and always nurture a sense of gratitude for what you have.
What does this approach achieve for you? It turns anger into appreciation, fear into active involvement, and wasted time into useful time. That is living mindfully.
Martin Stepek is founder of TenforZen, offering guided mindfulness sessions in handy, 10 minutes a day, audio courses. Author of four books, he is frequently asked to speak on mindfulness, his remarkable family heritage, and on business. See tenforzen.co.uk and www.martinstepek.co.uk or email martin@tenforzen.co.uk
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