When the Ground Opens Beneath Us
It is mid-January in Saskatchewan, and the air is mild. I step outside without bracing myself. My shoulders do not tighten. My breath does not turn sharp in my chest. I can walk without the small calculations that winter usually demands. There is something strangely buoyant about it.
And yet something in me recoils.
The relative warmth at this time of year carries a strange ambiguity. It feels good in my body, while feeling wrong in my gut. I know, in the way one knows something before it becomes a sentence, that this is not what January used to be. The ground should be sealed. The sky should be a canvas for ice crystals and sundogs, reflective in a way that throws light back into space rather than trapping heat in. Instead, today feels slushy, humid, and almost springlike.
This is one of the shapes climate distress takes. Not panic, not even fear in the ordinary sense. More like a kind of vertigo. The world gives me something pleasant, and I cannot receive it cleanly.
We have become used to talking about extreme events—about fires and floods and storms. Those are real, and they leave their mark in obvious ways. But another part of this story unfolds more slowly, through long stretches of stagnant weather. Weeks of smoke. Months of drought. Days of heavy rain. A polar vortex that refuses to loosen its grip. A heat dome that sits like a lid on a city. These patterns are not in our heads, but in the earth’s jet stream that behaves differently than it once did, leaving weather stalled and heavy.
These are not just meteorological facts. They are experiences that enter the nervous system. They shape how time feels, how we move through the seasons, how we vacation, and how much time we spend connected to nature. Perhaps most worrying is that these experiences often change how the future shows up in our imaginations.
Climate-related Distress
Some of the people I work with name climate-related distress directly. Many are afraid for the planet, for their children, for the lives they thought they would have. Others come in speaking of exhaustion, irritability, a strange difficulty with making plans, particularly in the summer months, when wildfire smoke is most oppressive. Clients do not always connect those feelings to climate change, but I believe the connection is there all the same, woven through the stories we tell ourselves and the anxieties we navigate.
Existential therapy has always been concerned with what happens when the ground beneath us no longer feels solid. Irvin Yalom wrote about the givens of existence, which include death, isolation, freedom/responsibility, and meaninglessness. And those existential pressures become concrete whenever the thin veneer of consumer bliss is peeled back to reveal what matters most. Climate change sharpens our awareness of the basic needs for all living beings—clean air, drinking water, food security.
In the grip of climate anxiety, the thought of death becomes not only personal but collective. A sense of isolation deepens when it feels as though individual actions make no difference. Freedom and responsibility become too heavy when every choice feels inadequate. Meaning itself begins to wobble when the future looks less like a horizon and more like a question mark.
What Continues to Hold
From this angle, climate anxiety is not a malfunction. It is a response to being awake in a world that is changing faster than our inherited ways of making sense of it.
Kierkegaard called anxiety the “dizziness of freedom.” Not because freedom is pleasant, but because it confronts us with the fact that we are responsible for what we do with the world we find ourselves in. Climate distress carries that same vertigo. It tells us that what we care about is at risk, and that our lives are entangled with something we feel in our bones as much as we understand with our minds.
What often makes climate-related distress harder is that so much of this is carried alone. Many people tell me they do not know where to speak about their grief for melting ice or disappearing species, about their anger at political inaction, about their shame for continuing to live inside systems they did not choose. These feelings do not always fit into dinner conversation or workplace small talk. Such thoughts can make a person feel strange, or excessive, or out of step with family and society.
Indigenous leaders have been reminding us for generations that land is not a backdrop. It is a relation. To feel the loss of it is not sentimental. It is a recognition of kinship. In a settler culture that taught us to treat the earth as a resource rather than a relative, climate distress can feel isolating because it runs against the grain of how belonging has been framed.
The work of existential therapy is not to make these feelings go away. It is to ask what they are pointing toward. What do you love that feels endangered? What are you responsible to, even when the future is uncertain? What kind of person do you want to be in a time like this?
On days like this one, when the air is warm, I find myself standing in that tension. I let my body enjoy the ease of walking outside in January. I also let myself feel the unease that rides alongside it. Neither cancels the other. Together, they tell a more honest story about where we are.
If you are carrying something similar, a mix of pleasure and dread, gratitude and grief, you do not have to hold it alone.
I host a free Climate Café at Inner Agora Counselling on the last Wednesday evening of every month from 7 to 8:30 PM, in person in Saskatoon. These gatherings are not about solutions or debates. They are spaces to speak, to listen, and to let the many faces of climate emotion be present without being fixed. You can learn more and register by following the link below.
Books to Explore
· Britt Wray, Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis (2022). Alfred A. Knopf Canada.
· Hope Jahren, The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here (2020). Vintage Books.
· Kate Schapira, Lessons from the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth: How to Live with Care and Purpose in an Endangered World (2024). Grand Central Publishing.
· Sarah Ray, A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet (2020). University of California Press.
