THE creeping culture in the country nowadays is oppressive, as deaths by murder among us Filipinos are counted in tens every day.

November does neither to the spirit as we remember our dead loved ones in a growing subculture that enjoys the horrors, or more accurately, the festivity and fun of Halloween and Trick-or-Treats. It is more tragic and depressing, however, to the families of those who died from extrajudicial killings be they guilty of drug activities or not.

Despite the culture of death, Christians, however, long believed that remembering of our loved ones must be permeated with soulful consolation that the righteous ones are now before the Lord, bathing in his love, joy and grace.

Catholics believe that All Saints’ Day last Nov. 1 was meant to remember the lives of those saints who lived among us; those ordinary and extraordinary saints who lived their lives following God’s will even to death. Nov. 2, All Souls’ Day, was meant to be spent to celebrate with prayers the memory of those other souls whose lives may not be saintly with hope that, in God’s mercy, they may reach the perfection necessary to keep the hope of eventually standing before God with the saints.

Thus, despite the signs of the worst of times, the time may still be the best of times.

Our Breakthroughs articles for November then will be focusing on the best of important things in our daily lives.

As a start, we begin by talking of the best time to solve our problems.

Like solving mathematical problems, solving other problems requires adaptability of solutions and the methods of arriving to it. Certain problems can task the mind, causing cognitive overload in the process. The more complex the problem, the greater energy is needed to sustain the cognitive process in trying to solve it.

Carol Der Sarkissian of WebMD observed that the best time to solve problems must be when you are more relaxed and thus of somewhat diminished energy. Getting high wired with laser-like focus will not help as the mind tends to be constrictive in its manner of thinking and approach to data and available resources. In effect, people tend to be close-minded or short-sighted when they are at their sharpest and most energetic.

The opposite state of depression or very low energy level cannot help also due to the inadequate level of mental and physical energy available to sustain cognitive processes necessary to evaluate available resources to devise a solution to the problem.

Albert Einstein once wrote: “The formulation of the problem is often more essential than its solution.” The solution then to solving problems is to have the necessary energy to correctly formulate it while relaxed enough to be open to all sources of the solution.