Panic and despair are not helpful.

In early 2020 we watched what happened when people succumbed to those emotions. We saw everything from people trying to shop the horrors away, to developing or rekindling substance abuse, to falling victim to anti-vax and anti-mask cults because they were utterly desperate to exercise control over something, even if by doing so they prolonged the illness and death around them. We saw attempts at resource hoarding. We saw active and passive suicide attempts, including through reckless driving. We saw a lot of behaviors that have not lifted since.

At the time, I shared the words of Viktor E. Frankl, a psychologist and Holocaust survivor. While in the concentration camp he observed the ways that fellow imprisoned people reacted while in the same place. He famously said while reflecting on the experience, “The one thing you can’t take away from me is the way I choose to respond to what you do to me. The last of one’s freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstance.”

I think of his words again this morning after seeing the despair and panic flooding social media, email, and in the texts I thought I had muted last night.

This is not the time to throw up one’s hands in despair, the way many have about climate change or the pandemic. Doomerism solves nothing; spreading the bad mood around takes others down with you.

Take a breath. Keep a private journal to express those worries, so that you aren’t dumping your anxieties all over others without their consent. Look at the way you connect with the human and non-human animals around you. Regardless of who has been elected into any office anywhere, the way you treat your neighbors and the people you pass on the street is fully within your control. You can call it “mutual aid” if you want to make it political, or you can go with the folksy terminology of “being neighborly.” Think about how you are contributing to the well-being of your community in real, concrete ways that have nothing to do with the Internet or voting; if you’re struggling to come up with some examples, then today is an excellent time to start taking small actions:

1. Use public transportation one day a week if you aren’t using it at all currently. You will broaden the range of people with whom you interact. When the concern is social isolation, put yourself into a different social setting (and do better by our habitat at the same time).

2. Create or contribute to a Little Free Library/Pantry. If your upper middle class neighborhood already has one, don’t build more there. Fund one in another area or donate goods for them. Spend time sprucing them up. When the concern is censorship, make the oppressors struggle to silence what books are distributed.

3. Plant a tree. This is the season for it. When the concern is an administration who believes they can breathe money, convert part of your yard to doing the work for the common good.

There are hundreds of small things that you can do, and as Joan Baez said, “action is the antidote to despair.”

There will be larger actions that require more from you, and those are important, but you don’t have to wait for a rally to be organized to choose how to respond.