Election Day Anxiety

While sitting at Jamaica Pond with my sign “What your biggest challenge right now?” I was approached by a couple of women. One in particular was interested in what the hell I was doing. 

After a pause, she responded. “My biggest challenge is the anxiety I’m feeling with the upcoming election.”

I’ve been hear that, or something along those line, for several weeks. The state of the world. American politics. It feels like it’s more than one’s brain can take in. It feels like America as we know it will end this week. Everyone feels a threat. But not everyone feels the same threat. 

But politics is not what this article is not what this article is about. Tomorrow votes will be cast, winners will be announced, and one half or the other will feel like that’s the end of the country as we know it.

This article is about uncertainty. We tend to forget that the only thing that we can be certain of is that there’s nothing we can be certain of. We can do our best to try to nudge the world one way or the other. And sometimes that’s all that’s needed to make the difference we want. An election can turn on literally a single vote. 

But more often than not, the workings of the universe are out of our control. 

Should we then just throw our hands up and give up? 

Well, if you’re a control freak, maybe so. For the rest of us, understand that you can’t control the universe. However - and this is the big one - you can control how you respond to how events turn. 

It was Viktor Frankl, in his book Man’s Search for Meaning, who explained, “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves. Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

There’s a 50 percent chance that Election Day will not turn out how you wish. If - or when - that happens, you’re next job will be to decide how you’ll respond, and what to do next.