I will rejoice
“Woe be unto you if you go into another year and waste another year with the old mentality, while somebody's in the hospital begging God for the opportunity that you have right now.” — TD Jakes.
I felt inspired just before the New Year to write something on mental health. Or perhaps I felt obligated.
It’s probably the latter that stopped the former from happening. The more I thought about it, the less inspired I was — if I ever was inspired at all.
The inspiration that I felt, I believe anyway, stemmed from stumbling upon a song from Steve Angello.
If you’re an EDM fan (electronic dance music, and not the Edmonton Oilers), you may know Angello as one-third of Swedish House Mafia. Swedish House Mafia, for those unaware, was one of several DJs or DJ groups that brought EDM to the mainstream masses in the late 2000s and early 2010s.
I’m a fan, but I hadn’t heard Angello’s song Rejoice in quite some time.
Spotify reminded me of it during the final week of 2021.
The song itself is a slow burn and features T.D. Jakes from one of his countless sermons.
Jakes is a well-known evangelist from the U.S.
I’ve rarely spoken of my own faith, a Christian faith. I like to keep church and state (work) separate. I’m not a fan of evangelists, either. I’m of the opinion that most do more damage to Christianity than they do good.
But who am I to judge, right? I am far from perfect.
Regardless, Jakes’ sermon that Angello samples on his song hit me right in the feels.
The quote at the top of his newsletter may have struck the loudest chord.
(You can hear the song, and read the lyrics — posted in the comments on YouTube — below.)
I didn’t want to head into 2022 with my old mentality.
So it won’t shock many that I did anyway.
The hope heading into 2021 was that this bloody pandemic would finally end. It became very apparent heading into the holiday season that it wouldn’t.
Travel for work had just resumed just a few weeks earlier. I traversed south across the 49th parallel for the first time since February 2020.
Mercifully, normality was beginning to resume. And then omicron hit, and rug from subsequent trips was ripped out from under me again.
I should place a disclaimer here: I’m very fortunate in what I do that I’m even allowed to travel, and get the opportunity to do so for work purposes. It’s a perk of the job that I’ve enjoyed immensely, and have struggled with, at times, mentally.
When I got a full-time gig on the sports beat covering the Winnipeg Jets, there was no pandemic. It would come several months later and I never did, and still haven’t, experienced covering a full season without restrictions.
It’s been tough at times for me to come to terms with that. So when the green light came back on after being stuck on red for what seemed like an eternity, I was giddy.
I spent just over 48 hours in Seattle for Winnipeg’s game against the Kraken. I took it all in, savouring every moment.
I broke down, too, at one point. I can’t sit here and type that I wasn’t quite nervous at times. When I say this pandemic has taken its toll on me, I don’t say that flippantly.
I’m triple-vaxxed, and while not the healthiest in terms of my weight, I have no other known ailments.
But I was nervous. Thankfully, Seattle takes COVID seriously. It didn’t take long to figure that out.
I’m in limbo again when it comes to work travel. It is what it is. Perhaps I took some of Jakes’ advice.
It’s funny how that sort of thing works, how something is put in front of you out of the blue that begins to shift your perspective.
“Woe be unto you if you go into another year and waste another year with the old mentality, while somebody's in the hospital begging God for the opportunity that you have right now.”
There were 517 Manitobans in hospital due to/or with COVID as of the time of writing this.
I’m not one of them.
There were 45 people in ICU when I sat down to write this.
I’m not there, either.
And the list of the 14 dead didn’t include a male in his 30s from Winnipeg.
But those lists, even recently, have.
Men and women in their 20s and 30s. Young people taken far too early.
And here I am, worrying when I’ll get back on a plane again. Wondering when a flight attendant will ask if I want a Biscoff cookie again.
Jakes, in his sermon, asks a simple question: "Do you have a mind to change?"
In some of my darker moments, I don’t feel I do.
“Give me a new mind means give me a new perspective,” Jakes says. “Give me a new perspective. Give me a new way of looking at my situation. Give me a new way of looking at my circumstances.”
Throughout the pandemic, my perspective has become bleak. There are times when I think there is hope, and others when I think all hope is gone (kudos if you got the Slipknot reference.)
That, of course, isn’t necessarily the case. Depression allows you to look through a lens that isn’t always accurate.
I yearn for positivity at times. In some ways, I feel my mental health robs me of that. In others, I feel I rob myself of it behind the veil of my mental health.
I don’t want my depression or anxiety to be an excuse to wallow.
It’s just so very easy to let it do just that.
It’s part of the struggle.
“But even the struggles are an opportunity for me to show off the victory if my mind can handle the change,” Jakes says.
If you haven’t watched 14 Peaks yet on Netflix, I would encourage you to do so. If you couldn’t care less about mountaineering, that’s fine. Just take 90 minutes, if you can find them, and give it a go.
The documentary follows Nirmal ‘Nims’ Purja.
Born in Nepal and naturalized and a British citizen, Nims served as a Gurkha with the British Army and then in Britain’s special forces. Both of those are already outstanding achievements, but it’s what he did during a six-month, six-day period in 2019 that was thought impossible.
It still defies logic.
(If you’ve heard of Nims before, it may be because you’ve seen the viral image of the traffic jam that gathered in the final few metres of the summit push — the Hillary Step, named after Sir Edmund Hillary, who along with Tenzing Norgay, became the first to summit Everest in 1953. On his descent, Nims turned around to snap the shot of the mayhem.)
For the unknowing, an eight-thousander refers to each of the 14 peaks in the world, all located in the Himalayas, that rise above eight-thousand metres.
Purja, who set out to climb all of them inside seven months, summited Everest, Lhotse (which is right next to Everest), and Makalu (nearby) in 48 hours.
He’d finish all of them in six months and six days.
To compare, the first person to do this, mountaineering legend Reinhold Messner, climbed all 14 in across a span of 16 years. The fastest to do it prior to Purja was seven years.
Purja dubbed the mission Project Possible.
He had his mind right.
It’s a testament to what humans can do, what the mind can overcome when stretched well beyond the limit.
An EDM song and documentary of what many would suggest was bat-shit insane to attempt in the first place — this is where I found inspiration in recent weeks.
There’s no straight line through mental health toils.
Some days, you grab ahold of whatever you can to get you through that day, that hour, and even that minute.
Other days, I just need to rejoice and be glad.
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