5 Handholds for Your Odyssey

Helpful reminders for the ups and downs of our journey

Hello there! Thanks for being here on the birth of this new space to explore thriving, health, illness, and all of its entanglements. This newsletter will be coming out twice a week with a longer piece on Sundays and a collection of interesting things I’ve run across on Wednesdays, called Field Notes. This is new terrain, so please send me feedback, ideas, and suggestions anytime. You can email me at brianne@daybreaknotes.com.

You can find past issues here. Any one who is a subscriber can comment on the threads on the webpages. I’d love to build up a space for all of us, so please chime in with related links and resources, how a recipe worked out for you or what ingredients you substituted (successfully or not), tips about what has worked for you, and questions.

I should also tell you straight-away (most of you know this already!) that I am not a doctor or a nurse or a medical professional of any kind. There will be no medical advice in any of these newsletters. I write from the perspective of a human who has been sick and has been well, who has learned a few things along the way, and who carries with her 15+ years in journalism and an inclination toward curiosity.

In that vein, I thought we could start with a few things worth remembering on our own personal winding odysseys of joy and pain, suffering and contentment, confusion and clarity.

These grounding truths can slip out of our awareness so easily, but I find whenever I refocus my attention on them, it helps.

I hope they might help you, too.

1} There is always a reason to hope.

There’s always something that can help. There might not be a cure for a specific physical ailment or disease yet, but we are more than our skin and bones and organs. We have a whole emotional and mental and spiritual side to our existence. (I am using spiritually broadly here, to encompass both the belief in a soul and the belief that we each have a unique self that needs nurturing. You might believe one or both or something different.) Coping with an illness and its changes to one’s identity can sometimes be worse than the symptoms.

Whenever we get stuck, it’s tempting to feel like we will be stuck forever, that this dark day will repeat itself for eternity. I’ve felt like that at times. How in the world will this ever change? But it can. Life often changes in ways we don’t foresee.

Millions upon millions of people have come before us, learned, written down their wisdom, shared it, built upon it. There are so many tools now! There are more ways forward than we know. There are more books, courses, interviews, workshops, people, wisdom, and insights available to us now than there every have been in human history. Some of them might not work for you, but some of them will. It’s not a matter of there being no options left. It’s a matter of being willing to try and follow what seems to help your specific body — which includes your brain, your lungs, your skin, your neurons, all of it.

There is so much that most of us weren’t taught in school: Like how our busy minds can be trained to focus, or how our emotions need processing and how to do it, or how we can live more at peace even in troubled moments.

Dr. Shane Lopez defined hope as

“The belief that the future will be better than the present, along with the belief that you have the power to make it so.”

That belief is the crux of Odyssey of the Body.

Yes, one day, each of us will die. It’s inescapable for all of us.

But until then, there is a mountain of insights to discover, a balm you haven’t tried yet, a particular daily delight you haven’t learned about yet, a lovely person you haven’t met yet. There’s always a reason to hope.

2} A medical diagnosis is only one piece.

Our emotional and mental and spiritual journeys need nurturing, too. You can be terminally ill and yet be cheerful. You can have no physical diseases and yet angry and resentful. When we do feel sick, we tend to look for a diagnosis, medication, or operation that will fix it. All of those can be important. But our society neglects the power of friendships, community, sleep, food, and processing our emotions in helping us feel well. And our attitude makes a giant difference, whether or not the surgery goes well.

The parts outside of the traditional medical diagnosis matter, and they are something you can work on any day, without anyone’s authorization.

3} Every single one of us has good days and bad days.

We all have ups and downs in our odyssey. No one is immune. The person who seems to have it all together has crises and horrible moments, too. Think of all the Hollywood stars with cliff-side mansions and swanky cars who have suffered terribly. You can never know another person’s full life, the complexities and influences and sorrows and dreams, their experiences, from childhood to now, the trauma they may be carrying, the surprises they may have had. Sonder is a great word for hidden complexity of other people’s lives.

A definition of Sodor, from the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows:

“The realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.”

4} We aren’t alone. 

At times, it may certainly feel like it, that each of us is adrift, isolated, lonely, staring into our phones. The U.S. Surgeon General has written a beautiful book on the epidemic of loneliness. Yet we are on a spinning planet of 7+ billion people. This note was written by a person, send across wires and air through devices made by thousands of other people, on font crafted by other people, on computer systems built by other people — to you. Your water, your plumbing, your electricity, your food, your water, your clothes are all possible because of thousands of other people.

And other people are waiting for connections, for friendships, for community, too. They are longing for it. People often don’t know how to help or how to get a friendship started. But it’s possible. All around you are hidden friends, waiting for a chat and more to turn into a real connection.

5} Messages need repetition.

When you find something that helps — a habit, an insight, a fact, a way of looking at the world, a wise aside from a friend — you have to hold on to it by repeating it.

We forget. We get distracted. We shift our minds on to the next thing.

As humans, we have all sorts of biases.

We fail to memorize things because we have learned we can usually look it up on the Internet — the “Google effect.”

We let one bad thing override a bunch of good moments — our negativity bias.

Professional marketers know you need to hear a message multiple times to change your actions. We can use the power of repetition, too, for our own good.

There are of course, many other tactics to help ensure sure you actually adopt a new habit or shift your sleep. (See The Power of Habits and Soundtracks). Hearing something again and again won’t make it happen.

But hearing it again and again does have power.

Holding a particular sentence — a quote, a belief, a perspective, a reminder — in your head helps shift your thoughts. That affects your feelings about the world, about yourself, and about what is possible. That affects what you do next. And that affects, over time, your hours, your days, and your life.

These 5 things all give me solace and hope.

Which one is your favorite?

What should be added to the list?

I hope you have a beautiful week ahead. See you on Wednesday!

To our journey and healthy days ahead,

Brianne