One overarching strategy for dealing with the experience of intense uncertainty is to do whatever you can to bring yourself back to the world of the finite – to things as they actually are in your own concrete world, and the concrete things you can control. As a first step, try not to see anxious feelings as something you’ve got to get rid of. Lisa Marchiano, a therapist and writer based in Philadelphia, suggests making it your mission “to tolerate uncertainty, rather than having to make it go away. That creates a different frame for thinking about things: all you have to do is tolerate it. Of course, that may be very difficult – but it can get us out of this place where we’re spinning our wheels, trying to fix something it isn’t within our power to fix.”
As the anxiety abates a little, it may even become possible to glimpse the profound truth that, as Marchiano puts it, “a crisis can heighten the opportunity to find meaning, to get clear about what matters most”. What’s your role here? There’s solace to be found in figuring out what this moment demands from you, then doing it as well as you can. It may not look like anything heroic from the outside. (“Maybe it’s just making sure the kids stay on top of their schoolwork, or doing your job as a clerk in a grocery store,” Marchiano says.) It won’t change the fact that nobody knows what tomorrow holds. But, then again, nobody has ever known what tomorrow held – yet life has always gone on, including its most uplifting forms. As Lewis said: “If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun.”
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The Rambam holds that there is a mitzva to daven every day. The Ramban says that there is a mitzva to daven only at a time of distress - בעת צרה.
Rav Soloveitchik explained that the Rambam agrees in principle w/ the Ramban. He just thought that EVERY DAY is an עת צרה!!! Man's constant existential angst.... [עי' שיעורי הרב על תפילה בהקדמה].
C.S. Lewis [להבדיל] was מכוון לדעת גדולים.
