This moment. This moment. This moment.: This strategy puts you in mind of this scene from Season 2 of Umbrella Academy. Throughout both season, Five had leapt through time over decades, finding and causing much mayhem. Here, himself on death’s doorstep, he remembers a suggestion — from his own older-but-really-younger-by-two-weeks self, if I remember correctly — to try leaping in “seconds, not decades.”

This slow, tiny, hopping is the way you visualize yourself, now, moving through your day, resolving your conundrum. You can manage being in this moment, doing this thing, not thinking about the future; but life demands that you think, look, forward to the next thing and the thing after that and the thing next week, causing you panic. So, how do you get from now to then without collapsing? Like Five: “by seconds, not decades.” Think of yourself as leaping from this task to that; or, rather, non-think of yourself leaping from this task to that.

In a moment of synchronicity, which wasn’t so magical because the whole world pretty much is finding themselves in the state of despair, you came across a New York Times article on resiliency. They seem to be doing a series of articles on the topic. This one — oh, lord, it’s the FB algorithm spiders, isn’t it? — this one showed up in your feed — the fuckers! (What would Carl Jung do with social media?) The author said roughly the same thing, just less whimsically. She got herself and her children through a traumatic experience by not thinking beyond the present. (Of course, you now cannot find the article, so who knows how old it was.) Her experience became a means of growing stronger and enabling her to manage this present crisis and she argued for seeing crises as means of developing coping mechanisms.

Well, yes and that conclusion also seems like the simplistic, upbeat conclusion for a popular publication. The article also ended with a list of traits that mark people as being more resilient. Anyone reading this can already guess that they included the exact same checklist for modern-day, well-adjusted happiness that could be dropped into any self-help article. You hate those lists because you seldom can check anything off on them and, as a result, feel like you are a failure. They feel like yet more things that you have to do and you are just tired of chasing that trophy even as some inner magnet seems to pull you toward them.

Still, you were with her up to that list.

You also wonder — and your shrink raised this question — if your own coping mechanisms have more been to escape than to develop that resiliency. As a child, you read to escape, not to learn things or develop a critical eye or anything deeply intellectual. You wanted a safe way out of the screaming conflict of your home. You turned to literature and then to history because they seemed routes out of the miserable here and now.

Here and now always catches up to you.

Your mind has blocked off the future as a reality after a certain point, or turns it into a dystopian hellscape that paralyzes you, because you cannot deal with a potentially world-ending level of uncertainty. You cannot deal because you feel powerless and your reaction to feeling powerless has always been to find an escape route, to make a contingent plan, and then a contingent plan for the contingent plan, and there seems no way to make a contingent plan these days.

So you freak out.

So you concentrate on this moment and try to make leaps by seconds, not decades.

Time to make a leap.