Reaching the Sunny Shore Under Darkening Skies—A few words ahead of the 2026 US mid-term elections
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| The sunny shore at Dumpton Gap, Broadstairs, August 2026 |
A short “thought for the day” offered to the Cambridge Unitarian Church as part of the Sunday Gathering of Mindful Meditation, Music & Conversation
(Click on this link to hear a recorded version of the following piece)
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This coming Tuesday, voters in the United States go to the polls for their mid-term elections. Even from this side of the Atlantic, it is almost impossible to escape the gravitational pull of American politics, and over the coming days the news will be full of speculation, anxiety and dread. For many of us who care about liberal values, democracy and plain human kindness, it brings back an unsettlingly familiar feeling: a creeping sense of powerlessness in the face of darkening political horizons.
It takes me straight back to another November morning, almost two years ago.
It was 6 November 2024, a cold and grey day here in Cambridge. As I made my morning tea, I switched on the radio and heard that Donald Trump had been elected to a second term as US President. As the broadcasters ran through the likely consequences – for America, for the wider world, and for a Europe and a Britain already facing their own rise in right-wing nationalism – I felt my mood plummet.
How on earth was I to respond to what felt like a monumental shift in the world’s trajectory, one I could do almost nothing to resist? And, as a Unitarian minister whose duty is to help people keep sight of a genuine, liberal, free-religious hope, how could I carry on in a way that stayed positive and energising? If I couldn’t do that with a clean heart and full belief, well, I thought, perhaps it was time to quit.
That tiny, physical shift broke my sense of paralysis – and in doing so, it brought to mind the founder of the Czech Unitarian movement and creator of the Flower Communion, Norbert Fabian Čapek. For years I had kept his photograph on my desk, and thanks to a brief English summary, I knew he had published a book in Prague in 1939 called To the Sunny Shore: A Guide to Living Joyfully, all about ‘the conscious creation of mood’. Experiencing for myself how a simple pool of light and a warm mug could alter my inner state on a bleak morning, I suddenly wondered: might Čapek’s book show us how to respond, creatively and well, to intolerance and authoritarianism in our own time? Driven by an urgent need to read his words right then and there, I looked online – only to find there was still no English translation available. Yet that small lift in my spirits had given me back a sense of agency. If I couldn't change the headlines, I could at least do this. So, armed with a Czech dictionary and some of the newly released large language models, I set to work, line by line. Another year of revisions with the translator Ruth Jochanan Weiniger followed, and the result is the first English version of the book Čapek published in 1939.
The date 1939 matters. Earlier editions, under the title, Mood and its Conscious Creation. had appeared in the optimistic 1920s, when Czechoslovakia was a vibrant young republic. So, why change it to To the Sunny Shore just after being betrayed at the Munich Conference, when Britain and France allowed Hitler to take over the Sudetenland and, shortly afterwards, occupy the rest of the country? A book about joy, on the eve of the Holocaust, might sound tragically naive.
Yet I am convinced the new title was not naive, but prophetic. Čapek knew what was coming. In the autumn of 1939, he told a colleague, ‘The times are bad and they are likely only to get worse, but I must stay. I cannot leave, my congregation will need me.’ He was no longer offering a simple self-help manual, but a work of resistance: the coming horrors could be withstood only if people found practical, everyday ways to safeguard their inner spirit and live joyfully through the darkest hours. Then, in 1941, Čapek and his daughter Zora were arrested by the Gestapo, accused of listening to the BBC and, in his case, of high treason. In 1942, after some time in the Dachau concentration camp, he was killed, probably by poison gas, at Hartheim Castle. It is said that those who knew him in Dachau remembered him going to his death with ‘equanimity and heroism’. The darkness of the horror did not make the content of his book irrelevant; rather, the power of its contents was verified—as it was again for Czech Unitarians throughout the long decades of Communist rule.
Now, much of the medicine and psychology Čapek draws on dates from the 1920s and 1930s, and, inevitably, some of it is simply wrong. But this is not a problem when we read his book as we would read the Roman poet Lucretius, for example. We read Lucretius, not for his provisional science, but for a basic method of living without fear, alongside a profound recognition of the importance of friendship and community. What lasts in Čapek’s book is the spirit in which he uses his examples.
Take chapter eighteen, ‘Colours and Mood’, which made me smile in recognition. Čapek describes an older woman whose morning grumpiness melted away ‘like old, dirty snow’ once she moved from a grey bedroom to one with yellowish silk curtains, and he notes that orange-yellow light stimulates the nerves to greater activity and alertness. I can’t vouch for all his physiological theories. But I don’t need to – because before I had even read that chapter, that very same orange-yellow light had done for me at my kitchen table exactly what Čapek claimed it would: it had stirred my nerves out of despair into alertness and activity, setting me off on the journey to make his words available to the English-speaking world at this critical moment in its history.
Čapek’s core advice is, throughout, disarmingly everyday and practical. Live in the present, treat your anxious thoughts like a shepherd with his sheep: when they wander into fields of past regrets or future fears, gently move them back to today. Don’t build monuments to sorrow, and don’t let anger poison your blood. Instead, he points to the example of a child raised without fear or anger, who speaks so boldly and trustingly to neighbours, animals and parents alike that we cannot help but return that trust – reminding us that ‘what you call into the forest, the forest echoes back to you’, and urging us to act as a ‘broadcasting station of love’ that clears the air for others. Seek nourishment in simple beauty – a flower on the table, a starry sky, a pitcher of water waiting to refresh someone. And remember that keeping your spirits up is not selfish. He tells of a head nurse who scolded her young nurses for abandoning their lunch out of sympathy for a badly injured patient: weakened by hunger, they would be no use to the one who needed them.
So, as we look towards Tuesday and whatever follows, Čapek reminds us that the ‘sunny shore’ is not a distant utopia where everything has been resolved. It is an inward disposition, a daily choice, a practice. To notice the warmth of a teacup, to welcome the orange-yellow light of a kitchen lamp, to refuse to surrender your humour, your kindness or your inner freedom to the merchants of fear and division: this is not escapism. It is how we stay whole, alert and strong enough to be of use to a bruised and often hurting world.
And it is in that same spirit that I now offer Čapek’s book to you: in the hope that all who read it, in bright times and in dark, may find a way – if only for a moment of each day – to that sunny shore.
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