You Can’t Stop The Waves:
Reflections On A “New Normal”
BY: DR. NURIT ISRAELI
“You can’t stop the waves, but
you can learn to surf.”
– Jon Kabat-Zinn
Health authorities and news
organizations often refer
to the attacks of the Coro-navirus
as waves: We are now in
the midst of the “first wave,” de-scribed
as a “soliton wave” – self
reinforcing, traveling rapidly,
maintaining its shape while it
propagates. Some experts antic-ipate
a “second wave,” and some
foresee a sequence of “waves of
infection,” hitting us in the future.
We are still under the influence of
the “first wave,” which has been
rolling and rolling – fierce, vicious
and long lasting. It has forced us
into a “new normal,” so different
from the lives we have been ac-customed
to...
Jon Kabat-Zinn, professor of
medicine emeritus at the University
of Massachusetts Medical School,
where he founded the Stress
Reduction Clinic, titled his famous
first book: Full Catastrophe Living.
The term “full catastrophe” is bor-rowed
from Nikos Kazantzakis’
novel: Zorba the Greek. When
Zorba’s young companion inquires
whether he has been married,
Zorba replies: “Oh, yes. Wife.
Children. Home. Everything. The
full catastrophe!” This is not meant
to be a lament! Zorba, a lover of
life, appreciates the richness of life
– including the inevitability of sor-rows.
2020
He celebrates life, in spite of
July failures and defeat. For Kabat-Zinn,
catastrophe means “the poignant
¢enormity of our life experience.” It
COURIER includes crises and major disasters,
in addition to many little things that
problem-solving skills, recall our
go wrong and add up – all parts of
previous ways of adapting to new
the fabric of life, side-by-side with
circumstances, remember our
TOWERS the joys and the pleasures.
role models, reclaim our ways of
Life is, indeed, an uneven path,
maintaining optimism, refine our
always in flux, constantly chang-ing,
spirituality...
and as Kabat-Zinn concludes:
I lost a very dear friend this past
SHORE “You can’t stop the waves.” As in
month. He was a visionary architect
a sea, unexpected waves approach
who once gave me a book about
the otherwise placid shores of our
sandcastles. In conversations, he
NORTH daily existence. Waves of different
used to passionately endorse the
shapes, with more or less feroc-ity,
efforts sandcastle builders invest
cresting and sinking, some
in their impermanent creations,
20 tall and rough, others small and
despite knowing that the waves manageable. Waves keep on com-ing
our way without early warning
signs, catching us off guard, unsus-pecting
and unprepared. Think of
the “waves” you have encountered
in your personal life: medical crises
and relationship crises, wars and
hurricanes, losses of all kinds...
They came, wave after wave, and
you somehow weathered them and
moved on, no doubt learning much
about yourself in the process. I do
agree with Henry David Thoreau,
“Not until we are lost do we begin
to understand ourselves.”
“Waves” force us to rapidly
adjust to change. Nowadays, in
conversations, new topics are dis-cussed:
How do you get food deliv-ered?
Any “stay-at-home” comfort
food recipes? Which protective gear
do you use? Should we or shouldn’t
we go out? New concepts are being
introduced: Instacart and Mercado,
N95 and Alcogel, Zoom and Six-feet-
away. The pandemic is expand-ing
our vocabulary. Until recently,
who among us used terms like
social distancing? PPE? Fomites?
Viral load? Drive-thru testing?
Contact tracing? Flattening the
curve? Droplet transmission? Who
among us knew how to differenti-ate
between respirators and ven-tilators?
The difference between
sheltering-in-place and lockdown?
Who knew when to use the term
self-isolation and when to use the
word quarantine?
Our world right now is saturated
with losses, and stress – which can
manifest itself in a variety of ways
– is a natural response to events that
disrupt our equilibrium. It is not
easy to keep our heads above water,
our families safe, and our friends
in check, while waking up every
day to new numbers, unfathomable
numbers, of those claimed by the
virus. And the uncertainty about
the duration of this calamitous virus
attack increases our stress levels.
Look inward: How is your
stress manifested? Sadness?
Irritability? Fear? Sleeping diffi-culties?
Reduced energy? Reduced
concentration and productivity?
Interpersonal problems? Physical
symptoms? Unfamiliar behaviors?
(Recently, a colleague made me
laugh when he introduced the fol-lowing
distinction: talking to trees,
chairs, your TV, or any other inan-imate
objects is within the normal
range these days, but hearing them
talk back may indicate a problem...)
What can we do at this point
to facilitate adaptation? Refine
our coping skills? Many years
ago, while learning to swim at the
beautiful beach of my hometown, I
was taught that when a tidal wave
comes my way, I should never try
to escape. Rather, I should face it
and dive under it, floating with the
current, so that I will emerge on the
other side unharmed. I remember
the feeling of being “on the other
side of the wave” – the sense of
wellbeing in a sea that subsides,
with the threatening wave mov-ing
away, becoming smaller and
smaller.
There is no single infallible way of
navigating life crises. But whether
d i v i n g
under or
learning to surf, we must face each
“wave” head on. Resilience begins
with acceptance of the new reali-ty,
even though it is clearly not as
appealing as the one we had before.
As Robert Frost said: “The best way
out is through.”
Dr. George Bonano, a colleague
from Columbia University who has
dedicated years of rigorous research
to exploring resilience, found that
people are generally more resilient
than what had been believed pre-viously,
even when facing extreme
stressors. Resilience is common
rather than extraordinary. We
have innate potential for weather-ing
life’s storms. Life experiences
shape the innate neural circuity of
the brain, creating a predisposition
for resilience that influences our
subsequent responses.
Look back at your own life.
Retrieve your memories of difficult
times. Summon up your ways of
coping with rough “waves” in the
past: How did you weather past
storms? How did you manage
to move forward? What helped
you emerge from crises stronger?
Although we have never been
through a global pandemic before,
we have all experienced adversity in
one form or another. In my previous
two articles about the pandemic, I
outlined coping strategies having
to do with the Here and Now, such
as meditation, imagery, cognitive
restructuring, and ways of keeping
the closeness within the distancing.
I wish to add yet another coping
strategy related to our history. With
each new “wave,” we can try to rely
on our past experiences of bounc-ing
back, retrieve our acquired