Over the last years, the world has thrown quite a few problems at us.

Maybe one could also say that change is happening at a speed that seems hard to keep up with.

A few days ago, climate change was the biggest problem. With a pandemic around us, worries about climate change almost disappeared as health became a priority. And now health can’t be our priority anymore and almost disappeared from the news as it is now life that is in danger. We see those threatened right now, but we don’t know how big the threat may become.

What is happening is simply overwhelming.

So overwhelming that it seems impossible to notice how we feel about it.

The problems are too big. They seem to have such an impact on us that we would want to immediately get rid of them. And yet it feels as if we can’t do anything about it.

Not being able to do anything about it brings many of us to want to do something.

And yes, naturally, things are popping up, ways to help those in need, ways to shout how much injustice there is, ways to see how those in charge are not doing their job, ways to engage even more in one’s job.

It is acting according to urgency.

There is nothing wrong with any of these activities.

However, they may not be the real priority we have. And that is to take a moment to feel the impact of what is happening and how it affects us. It is to give ourselves the power back we have.

Viktor Frankl suggested three values to find meaning: creativity, experiential, and attitudinal.

What he also knew, is that we might not be able to have access to all three of them at the same time. For Viktor Frankl, this meant, that “when we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”

But we can’t do it if we don’t take time to feel the impact of the situation and take the time to see what is within our control.