I RECENTLY had a brief moment to reflect on my behaviour when a difficult situation arises, and I’m sure many people will resonate with this. Whenever a problem appears on the horizon, we suddenly become Olympic athletes. We run. We run from the conversation we need to have; we run from the decision we know we need to make; we run from the grief sitting inside our chests; we run from the relationship that has been bleeding us dry, the habit that has been eating our peace and the truth that has been knocking on the door for six months. We run from the storm.

And then, because human beings possess a knack for confusing movement with progress, we congratulate ourselves for getting away from it, except the storm is still behind us.

There is an image from nature that has stayed with me: the American bison facing a winter storm. When severe weather approaches, bison has been observed turning towards the storm, lowering their bodies and moving into it rather than simply fleeing in the same direction; their thick coats, powerful bodies and low stance allow them to endure conditions that would be dangerous for other animals. The National Park Service describes this behaviour as part of the bison’s remarkable adaptation to harsh winter weather.

Now, there is a popular version of this story that says the bison understands that running towards the storm means spending less time inside it. It makes a wonderful story. Science, however, gives us a more modest explanation. There is no good evidence that the bison is sitting there doing meteorological mathematics in its enormous furry head. And frankly, I prefer it that way. The lesson does not require the bison to understand the weather. It requires us to understand ourselves. Sometimes, the way through a storm is through it. Mind you, this does not mean we deliberately walk into danger. It does not mean we remain in abusive situations, tolerate mistreatment, ignore wise counsel or pretend suffering is somehow noble. There are storms we leave, there are doors we close, and there are places from which we wisely remove ourselves.

But some storms live inside us. Those are the ones we have a peculiar habit of carrying wherever we go. We avoid the conversation, so the resentment grows; we suppress the grief, so it finds another language; we refuse to admit that something has ended, so we keep dragging its corpse through tomorrow; we avoid looking at our finances, and the numbers become uglier; we ignore the crack in the relationship, and eventually the crack becomes a wall; we postpone the decision, and the decision eventually arrives with interest. So, you see, life really does have a strange way of sending the same examination paper back to us until we finally stop pretending we forgot our glasses.

Psychologists have a name for one part of this pattern: ‘experiential avoidance’. It refers broadly to attempts to escape, suppress or control difficult thoughts, emotions, memories or sensations. Research has linked stronger experiential avoidance with greater psychological distress and poorer well-being. In other words, sometimes our attempt to avoid discomfort becomes the very thing that keeps discomfort alive. We run from anxiety and become more anxious about feeling anxious. We run from sadness and become frightened of our own sadness. We run from uncertainty and become obsessed with controlling everything. We run from failure and become too afraid to try. We run from rejection and build a life in which nobody gets close enough to reject us; then we call it peace. It is actually a very expensive form of hiding.

Steven C. Hayes, one of the founders of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, developed an approach that deliberately challenges emotional avoidance and encourages people to make room for difficult inner experiences while continuing to take meaningful action. Acceptance does not mean surrendering to a terrible circumstance. Acceptance means seeing the weather accurately. The sky is dark, the wind is strong, and the road is flooded. All this is what is happening. Now, what can I do? This is very different from standing in the rain, screaming at the clouds because we had already scheduled sunshine. There is a lot of spiritual wisdom in that distinction, too.

Eckhart Tolle writes, ‘The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it.’ Does this mean that difficult circumstances are imaginary? Of course not. Pain is real, loss is real, betrayal is real, poverty is real, illness is real, and broken hearts are remarkably physical things for something we casually describe as emotional. But there is the event, and then there is the story we build around the event. Something happened, then the mind says: this always happens to me; I will never recover; everyone leaves; I am finished; my life is ruined; and so on. The storm becomes a hurricane partly because we keep feeding it our imagination.

Tolle’s teaching invites us back to the fact itself. What happened? What is happening now? What can actually be done?

The bison does not appear to stand in the snow composing a seventeen-chapter autobiography about how unfair winter is. It lowers its head, adjusts its body, faces the weather and waits. Sometimes, our greatest act of faith is simply standing still long enough to discover that the thing we feared would destroy us is passing.

Viktor Frankl expressed another side of this wisdom when he wrote, ‘When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.’

There it is. Sometimes, we can change the storm; sometimes, we can change our direction; sometimes, we can change the shelter we are standing under; and sometimes, all we can change is ourselves. The mistake is believing that every difficult season requires immediate escape. While some seasons require movement, others require endurance; some require action, others require surrender; and some require us to finally stop running in circles long enough to notice that we have been carrying the same problem from one location to another.

Remember, a person can leave one relationship and carry the same insecurity into the next. A person can change jobs and carry the same bitterness into the new office. A person can move across the country and still wake up with the same unresolved anger. A person can delete a telephone number and still have an entire conversation with that person every night inside their head. Changing the scenery does not automatically change the weather inside us. That is why facing a problem is so powerful. When we face something, we can finally see its shape. Fear becomes a conversation; grief becomes tears; confusion becomes a question; failure becomes information; a difficult relationship becomes a boundary; a mistake becomes a lesson; a painful ending becomes a just ending; and an ending, despite the dramatic performance we usually give it, is sometimes simply life clearing the stage for another scene. We have been taught to think courage looks like fearlessness. It rarely does. Courage often looks like shaking hands, opening the letter, making the phone call, saying, ‘I was wrong.’ Courage looks like admitting, ‘This hurts’; like sitting with yourself without immediately reaching for a distraction; like turning towards the storm and saying, ‘All right. Let us see what this has to teach me.’ This is where the spiritual lesson becomes beautiful. The storm does not always come to punish us. Sometimes, it comes to reveal what was never strong enough to survive the wind. Sometimes, it strips away an identity we outgrew. Sometimes, it blows the comfortable lie out of the window. Sometimes, it shakes the tree so violently that the fruit that was ready to fall finally does. And sometimes, after all the noise, we discover that we were never being destroyed; we were being rearranged. Of course, none of this means we romanticise suffering. There are storms from which we must seek shelter. There are situations where leaving is wisdom. There are moments when asking for professional, spiritual or practical help is the bravest thing a person can do. Facing a storm does not mean facing it alone. Even bison do not wander through winter as isolated philosophers. They are herd animals. Perhaps that is another lesson we have forgotten. Strength does not always mean standing alone. Sometimes, strength means saying, ‘I need help.’ Sometimes, the storm is survived because somebody stands beside you. But eventually, there comes a moment when every human being must face something personally: the truth, the grief, the fear, the choice or the change. Maybe this is why this strange image of the bison stays with us. The animal does not need to know that the storm will end. It simply knows how to meet the weather. Let’s be like the bison and stop running from our storms. Below is poetry for perspective, as usual.

When the Storm Comes

When darkened skies come rolling near,
And thunder drums its song of fear,
Turn toward the wind, breathe deep and stand,
Let courage take your trembling hand.

The rain may fall, the wild winds roar,
Yet every storm has passed before;
What shakes the heart and bends the tree
Can wake the strength we could not see.

So face the thing you tried to flee,
The truth you buried quietly;
For wounds concealed beneath the skin
Grow roots where healing could begin.

The road may twist, the night may sting,
The storm may steal away the spring;
But clouds are travelers passing through,
And morning keeps its promise too.

What life has brought, let wisdom meet,
With grounded soul and steady feet;
For fighting what we cannot change
Can make a prison out of range.

And when at last the winds grow mild,
You may discover, almost wild,
The storm that frightened you before
Was only opening another door.

So when the heavens darken blue,
And life feels far too much for you,
Face what you can, release the rest,
Walk through the rain and do your best.

Because somewhere past the wind and rain,
The sun will find your face again;
And you will smile, surprised to see,
The storm passed through, but strengthened thee.

Romella Dasratt