What is Here Now if There Are No Problems to Solve?
The Question That Lingered
During the third of six Wise Habits presentations, a question was posed: What is here now if there are no problems to solve? At the time, I didn’t give it much thought. After all, there are always problems to solve.
I realized this truth one summer morning. Everything should have been fine, yet I found myself inflating a minor concern, letting worry stretch to fill the space—because that is what worry does to my brain. It lives in a vacuum, expanding until it consumes all available room. I wrote about it then, but last week, I truly lived it.
The Storm That Locked Us In
It was a snowstorm, followed by rain, followed by an unforgiving freeze—by Sunday night, I recognized that we were iced into our home, and all visitors were iced out. Single-digit temperatures and gusty winds loomed in the forecast for a week to come. And so, my mind did what it used to do best: it catastrophized.
“What if the boiler fails? What if one of us needs medical help? What if the tree in front of the house gives in to the wind and crashes onto our roof?” The walls of our home seemingly began to close in, suffocating me with imagined disasters.
I’ve been working to rewire these tendencies, practicing the Wise Habit of redirecting my mind away from doom-laden rabbit holes. My worries are known to escalate from a stomachache to a cancer diagnosis in a New York minute (which, if you don’t know, is the time between a traffic light turning green and the first honk from the taxi driver behind you).
A Shift in Perspective
But by Monday morning, while standing at my kitchen window, staring out at the birdies navigating the icy tundra that used to be the front yard, something shifted in me. Instead of spiraling, I decided: “I have nothing to worry about.”
I then strapped on my ice cleats like an arctic explorer on a mission—because single-digit temperatures, fierce winds, and a treacherous ice rink of a walkway were no excuse to let my feathered friends go hungry. After realizing that I had nothing to worry about, I made my way down the long, steep, frozen driveway and felt an unexpected sense of freedom. The hill was impassable by car, but my own two feet carried me just fine. The very thing that had threatened to confine me had, in a strange way, liberated me.
This moment—moving through the cold, embracing the elements rather than fearing them—was vitality in action. Not just survival, but engagement. Not just endurance, but energy.
When Wanting Becomes Having
The the most profound shift, mind you, wasn’t logistical—it was mental. When I first realized I had to cancel my physical appointments for the week, my gut twisted. I’ve jokingly called myself a practicing recluse since moving to my secluded home, embracing solitude for introspection and creation. But when wanting to stay home became having to, it landed like a punch.
And so, I turned to Viktor Frankl.
Finding Meaning in the Moment
I’d been afraid to read Man’s Search for Meaning. I’m the kind of person who still hasn’t seen Jaws—even fictional horror stays with me. The real-life horrors I’ve witnessed in Holocaust museums have lingered in my soul. And yet, Frankl’s words have been foundational to my work in mindfulness, emotional regulation, communication, and culture-building.
“The space between stimulus and response is where our power lies”. I teach this. I believe this. But could I truly embody it?
I turned the pages and found not just survival, but sovereignty. Frankl wrote, "Only in this way can one explain the apparent paradox that some prisoners of a less hardy make-up often seemed to survive camp life better than did those of a robust nature." The strongest prisoners were not necessarily those with the most physical endurance, but those whose spirit remained intact. And then, a few pages later, there it was—my own realization, mirrored in his words:
“Suffering expands to fill the space it is given, just as a small amount of gas will fill an entire room, no matter its size.”
Vitality, then, is not just physical strength. It’s the energy of the spirit. It’s the choice to reclaim our emotional brain space, to shrink suffering rather than letting it expand unchecked.
The Freedom of Now
By the following Saturday, the ice had melted enough for me to drive again. I made it out. I made it back. And then I sat outside, listening. The wind rustled. Birds sang. And I felt free—lighter than I had in a long time.
No problems to solve. Just this moment. Just breath. Just being.
And now, the real question emerges: How do I sustain this feeling? How do I bottle it like a fragrance, dabbing it onto my spirit when needed?
I don’t have an answer yet. But I know this: Awareness is the first step. When the mind reaches for worry, for catastrophe, for problems to solve, I can gently redirect it….back to the birdsong. Back to the space between stimulus and response. Back to now.
Vitality is not about ignoring problems. It’s about choosing where our energy goes. It’s about filling our space with presence rather than panic.
And maybe, just maybe, you can too.
The Question Remains: What is here now, if there are no problems to solve?
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