This came to mind earlier, and I tweeted it to remember the thought so I could discuss it here. The idea's not original; I'm not even sure the wording is--it just came unbidden fully formed in my mind.
The other day at lunch all the women I eat with were bemoaning the difficulties of their lives. They were certainly within their rights to complain--one has had cancer (twice), others have had family issues or deaths to deal with. One woman wondered what she had done to deserve this. Another believed it was the end times. I realised I was the only person there who wasn't dwelling on the bad things in life, or taking it personally. Sometimes, I believe, things happen. They don't need a reason. They just are, and they are there to endure and hopefully grow from.
Sometimes it seems like the bad continues to march through your life, and you'll never feel good again. But I think many of us underappreciate when good things do come. Life is full of ups and downs. Sometimes they are of our making, and yes, we should learn from our own mistakes. But other times they simply happen beyond our control--a tornado takes out a house, a person we know commits suicide, an elderly relative dies after a long, lingering illness; cancer rears its ugly head, someone loses his job in downsizing and fails to get another despite working towards that goal due to a recession. There are all sorts of things that go wrong in our lives.
But it isn't what happens to us that is truly important--it's what we do with our adversities. How we cope shapes our lives. We can either rise to the challenge or become passive and shriveled, unable to act, and self-loathing, for it had to be our fault.
There was a news story not long ago about a woman who had survived a horrible crime in another part of Kentucky. She had been accosted by a man with a weapon and forced into her home, raped, and then when her children--two teenagers and a 5-year-old--came home, he killed them in front of her, then stabbed her repeatedly in the throat and set the house on fire to cover his tracks. Somehow, she survived. Somehow, she had the strength to go on. Somehow, she confronted him in court for his crimes.
I found myself asking, how could anyone endure that? How would life be worth living? That is perhaps one of the worst ordeals I could think of for someone to go through. And yet she lived. She wasn't attacked because she was a bad person. Her children didn't die because of some sort of karmic backlash. They were simply at the wrong place, at the wrong time, with a sick man armed with a knife. Yet we also cannot live like things like this will happen any moment. Life would not be worth living, with that much fear.
I'm not a strong person. I know that. I've been through a lot, and yes, I've gotten through with a fairly positive attitude, but something like what she went through would probably break me completely. Oddly enough though, even though I don't believe that this sort of experience is punishment for some sin, I believe in a higher power, so I can't help but think that there is some meaning to her life, some purpose, that could not be accomplished without her survival. I guess I just believe in a kinder, more rational power.
Maybe we're all meant to do something in our lives, something small or large, some thing that somehow fits into the grand scheme of things.
It's late, and I know I'm rambling. But it seemed important to put down my thoughts. I guess they help me not dwell on the bad things in my life, but maintain some optimism grounded in reality. I recognise that slowly my life is getting better, and that much of my pain was in some sense self-inflicted, and so since I can control that, I can make things better by taking the steering wheel of life by the hands. But for things I don't have control over--I have to just let go on that one. It's not sin. It's not the end times. It's not karma. It just is. You deal with it, you cope, you find yourself changing as a result into (hopefully) a better, stronger person. Through suffering, we learn, a friend often quotes to me. That's true.
I guess the point is rise to adversity, learn from your mistakes, and grow as a result, rather than dwelling on the whys and wherefores.
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