As we try to conduct our everyday lives, there now seem to be many large-scale concerns around us, from Covid to fuel costs and the rising cost of living to the risk of new conflicts between countries, and more – the ‘big picture’ currently seems more onerous than it has felt for some time.

The ‘big picture’ has aptly been called the zeitgeist – the spirit of the age – and while large-scale forces that are beyond our direct control swirl around us, the zeitgeist is undeniably oppressive, but it is still amenable to our positive frames of mind.

As Kendo has observed previously, worry can lead to stress and even insecurity, and if we begin to feel these things, they can add to the generally oppressive air of external events and thus add to a negative colour to the zeitgeist. Kendo advises that succumbing to these feelings should be avoided whenever possible, not only because we have enough to deal with, but because it is enough to have to contemplate the world’s difficulties without coping with additional feelings of fearfulness and negativity.

In such challenging circumstances, Kendo of course recommends that we should meditate. As we cannot have a direct bearing on the large-scale negative forces around us, it makes absolute sense that we should cast off any worries about them. Freeing ourselves from insecurities about the world around us will not only help us achieve a better-balanced sense of emotional well-being, but doing this will liberate our intuitive selves to advance wisdom to help us navigate these times.

Kendo counsels that this is also a highly responsible course of action – by working actively to shrug off bleak feelings, we become the guardians of positivity during challenging times, and thus we change the zeitgeist from being a collection of oppressive events which instil fear and worry to instead be an atmosphere of optimism and encouragement in the face of our challenges. This will yield positive results not just for ourselves, but our entire orbits – everyone we know, and by extension, the wider world. The zeitgeist is no longer a collection of oppressive circumstances, but is instead the positive, encouraging, enabling atmosphere that we choose to make it.

We can all benefit from calmness and optimism amid challenging times; re-booting ourselves through meditation disempowers events beyond our control from oppressing us, and instead empowers us to handle them in the best possible ways, and with the best possible outlook on life, whatever challenges it may hold. Seek and find that peace and strength in Zen.