Staying Sane in a Crazy World

An Assembling God’s Puzzle video

By Fr. Garry Richmeier, C.PP.S.

Many of us these days are feeling a lot of stress with everything going on in the world. I hear it often when I do counseling.

People talk about the world being crazy, that nothing is normal anymore, that everything is up in the air, and you can’t count on anything anymore. People wonder where everything is headed, and fear the possibilities.

And that is on top of the “regular” stressors of raising a family, making ends meet, holding down a job, and so on. At some point, we all can reach the limit of how much chaos and uncertainty we can handle before it drives us nuts. Since some level of chaos will always be a part of life’s puzzle, it’s good to have some strategies with which to deal with it in order to make our lives better.

The first strategy is to reduce the chaos that is within our control. That will not be things like changing world events or governmental actions. It is more like setting up personal and family daily routines, hanging around the familiar things/places/people, and immersing oneself in nature more, which tends to be more predictable and comforting.

It is also good to reduce our exposure to the chaos around us when possible. Limiting the amount of media we tap into is an example.

Another strategy has to do with adjusting how we are thinking about and looking at the chaos around us. If we give in to the thought that everything is chaos, and that is all there is because that is all we see and hear, we will naturally be overwhelmed and stressed out. But if we can hold on to a different, maybe a broader view of things, we might be able to reduce the stress to more manageable levels.

A helpful image or analogy came to me the other day as I was listening to someone speaking about the difference between weather and climate. He said that some people have trouble believing in climate change because they get climate confused with weather. He said that weather is what you see when you look out the window. It may be hot or cold, rainy or sunny, snowing or foggy. Weather changes often and is localized in a specific place. My weather in Kansas City will be different than my friend’s weather in San Francisco. And weather, as we all know, is chaotic at times.

Climate, on the other hand, is the bigger picture. The earth’s climate includes all the different weather events on the globe. Climate change describes the gradual and long-term movement of the earth’s climate, regardless of what weather is happening in any one area.

To get a sense of climate and climate change, a person can’t just look out the window. They must measure the gradual movement of global climate over time. It is more difficult to see any change in climate compared to changes in weather, so we “weather experts” have to rely on climatologists to give us an idea of where the climate is going. And that involves a certain level of trust in those professionals, without which we will see only the chaos of the weather out our window.

The chaos we see as we watch the daily news is our “weather.” It is all over the place, changing frequently. But it is the smaller picture in the bigger scheme of things. It is what is happening to us at the moment and can make us crazy if that is all we see. To stay sane, we need to trust that in the bigger picture, something else is happening, that there is something bigger at work. Some of us might call this God’s unfolding plan for the human race. Others might call this human evolution, or evolution of human consciousness.

I think Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was describing this “climate dynamic” when he said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” He was dealing with the chaos during the civil rights movement. What enabled him to keep going and not go nuts was holding on to the idea that the overall direction of history was heading toward greater justice and equality, even though it was difficult to see that in the midst of the chaos at the time.

We have to deal with the chaos as best we can, as we have to deal with the weather. But to stay sane and reduce anxiety and stress, we need to hold on to the belief that there is something happening beyond just our own limited perception of what we see going on.

It is difficult because that bigger picture is not as obvious as what we see out our window. But we can get glimpses of it if we try. Maybe we see it in the increase of voices calling for nonviolence. Or the numbers of organizations helping with the basic needs of people around the world.

We have to work at it to see the bigger picture because it isn’t always obvious. And maybe above all, it takes trust and faith that God has the bigger picture well in hand. If we believe that, anxiety, stress, and fear might not go away entirely, but they won’t be ruling our lives.

All of the videos in this series can be found here: Assembly God’s Puzzle.

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[Fr. Garry Richmeier, a Precious Blood priest and spiritual director, holds a Master’s of Divinity Degree from St John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota, and a Master’s of Counseling Psychology degree from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He is a licensed professional counselor and a licensed marriage and family therapist.]

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