ADVERSITY : Putting the problem in perspective
Mario
D’Couto
Adversity! What is it that comes to your mind when you
come across this word? While the world seems to be limping back to normalcy
from the pandemic, we cannot say for certain what would come next and in as
much as life can be or is challenging, the consequences can be ever more hard
to digest or deal with when they come to us unexpectedly rather than when we
foresee it. The solution to this? Resilience!
On the outset, I must say that resilience is something
that I struggle with because life can be pretty depressing or discouraging
despite your best efforts and yet we become stronger only by exposing ourselves
to the difficult situations in our lives just as lifting weights in the gym
makes our muscles stronger and so having gone through such experiences (which I
suppose you may have too), here are a few things that have helped me get by and
some things that I have learned during the pandemic.
The first thing to do is to admit that you have a problem
or you are going through a crisis. Doing this already gives you some level of
victory over your situation. The ultimate goal is not to be a victim of your
circumstances but a conqueror and that can happen by not hiding in the dark or
running away from adversity but facing it head – on.
Marcel Proust once said, “
We are healed of suffering only
by experiencing it to the full.” If we never fight the battle of suffering out
in the open, with full consciousness of what it is all about, we may miss
something that is essential to being fully grown. We will miss the full measure
of friendship that takes on its meaning, not in the passed cups of celebration
but also in sharing the chalice of anguish. We will never know real love
because in trying to perpetuate romance, we will not face the fierce and lonely
moments when lovers look like strangers to each other; we will not know the
full face of life because we have been afraid to look steadily into the eyes of
death.
People estranged from pain resemble children
overmedicated against infant diseases so that they never build up a strong
inner immunity against them. Those who never learn to live with pain only make
themselves more vulnerable to it. This does not imply that we should willfully
seek out opportunities to invite pain and suffering but rather, instead of
running from them, we need to learn to deal with it if we are to grow stronger
and mature as individuals.
What’s worse is that some people develop other kinds of
imaginary problems or issues to numb the real issues that actually require
attention. It becomes so bad when it reaches a point when one is unable to
distinguish the imaginary ones from those that are genuine. For example, to
deal with a loss of a loved one or a break – up, a guy resorts to drinking and
smoking. When left uncontrolled, not only is he carrying extra emotional
baggage but now he has another issue to deal with. Sometimes, the problems we
go through, perhaps certain things which we may not like, have very deep roots.
Such things may require professional help like that of a counsellor and yet
there are times when God’s grace works wonders. In fact, at any given day, I
would always rate God’s grace as having more power than any therapy in the
world.
The fear of making a mistake or the desire for perfection
can be paralyzing or even crippling, hampering or hindering us from going ahead
as Robert Kiyosaki once said,
“The biggest risk is not to risk at all”, for
example a student in graduate school, worked on a plan for a doctoral thesis,
seeking a holy grail of perfection in his research that would make it unique
and immune from criticism. The fear of not covering every possibility, the
anxiety over taking any risk at all paralyzed him. The years wasted away and
the thesis never written, he lost in a certain way but in the inner world of
his own personality, he kept on winning. He used the defence of perfectionism with
the skill of a field marshal. He never had to take a chance and he was never
criticized but he missed the doctorate and the chance to grow at the same time
This is just one example but it can apply to so many
other kinds of situations whether it’s that book you wanted to write, that
career or relationship you wanted to pursue, that song you wanted to compose or
an important decision that was left unattended because you wanted it to be
perfect, waiting for the right circumstances and so on. Perfectionism, can at
times, be a disease.
I guess what’s important is to accept the good and the
not so good as part of our lives. The more we try to run away from it, avoid it
or pretend as though it does not exist, it becomes a festering wound until one
day, the only solution is amputation. At the same time, I would also like to
add that there is a thin line that divides between accepting one’s self as a
form of despair and accepting one’s self with a sense of hope. What do I mean
this?
Accepting one’s self as a form of
despair is like throwing the towel and assuming all is gone or lost. For
instance, you may come across or hear people say,
‘I am just like that’ or
‘It’s in my nature and nothing can be done about it’ and so on. Accepting one’s
self with a sense of hope, on the other hand, is being aware of one's current
situation, which can include many things and not being undermined or subdued by
it, because within each of us is the power to overcome.
Dr. Eugene Kennedy uses a nice phrase called “Being
imperfect with grace” in his book, “The pain of being human”. Humans are made
strong to face hard truth. Because of our ability to choose and the inner
freedom that we all possess, the beauty of human life is that we can alter it.
In entering and embracing the normal pain of life, the
strong discover their own inner strengths to be free and responsible. As great
and graceful pottery emerges from fire, our best selves come out only when we
experience the truth about our incapable frustrations and longings.
The paradox of happiness is that to get it, one must
forget about trying to grab it directly. Happiness is a by-product of our
becoming absorbed in something worthwhile outside ourselves. It is not
necessarily correlated with pleasure. The world is filled with unhappy –
looking millionaires. Even the merchants of pleasure seem a glum and lonely
lot, constantly anxious about profit margins and competition.
Happiness is not passive. Passivity and withdrawal
attract pain and violence rather than peace and contentment. The truly happy
are actively engaged with life despite its difficulties. It is bound up with
effort and struggle. Thus when husbands and wives strive to love each other and
their children despite the difficulties and challenges they face in their
married life, it is a heroic act. Thus for the wise, the
‘pursuit of
happiness’ is the emphasis on the purposeful life rather than the daydreams
of gold at the end of the rainbow or lottery drawings.
Self – knowledge is, of course, indispensable to this
understanding of happiness. People who know themselves do not set goals that
are either beyond or beneath them. They constantly engage their strength in a
realistic approach to tasks that match them. They do not demand what they can
never achieve nor turn away from what they can really accomplish.
Adequate self – knowledge enables healthy people to
accept themselves as they are. They are aware of their feelings and the reasons
for their actions and do not distort them defensively. They can accept their
own imperfections as well as that in other people and in the world. People who
are emotionally healthy and stable assess their strengths and weaknesses, know what they can do and what they cannot do and as a result, set realistic goals.
They neither overestimate nor underestimate themselves in the face of life’s
tasks. This is the kind of strength that makes them productive and resilient.
That’s where maturity develops.
Maturity is learning to live with the tension. The mature
are not free from problems or have fewer problems. Instead they have more of
them and more responsibility for solving them. Mature people have a deeper
sensitivity to what is happening to them, they feel life’s strain more than the
immature and yet that’s where the difference lies. It is how they are able to
handle and deal with problems that sets them apart from the rest.
The mature are not afraid to integrate clashing feelings
and to let their own desires take second place in the order of action. The mature,
perhaps a dozen or more times a day, do things that in some way or other, they
do not feel like doing. This, in other words, means that they are gown up
rather than hung up on making the universe spin around their own personalities.
The fact of the matter is that we are all works in
progress. According to James Joyce, it takes a genius to go through life
without making any mistakes. Honestly, that is not possible. However, a genius
is called a genius because he or she is able to turn errors into portals of
discovery. The saddest graveyard is not the one in which our mistakes are
buried but the one in which the talents of people who are afraid to make
mistakes rest undisturbed.
Bruce Lee once said,
“Knowing is not enough; we must
apply. Willing is not enough, we must do.” We all can have various kinds of
dreams and aspirations but the fact of the matter is that it can become a
reality only if we act upon it. This could sound cliché or perhaps even jarring
but nothing could be further from the truth.
When we talk about fantasizing, we are referring to
things of imagination. Fantasies being restricted to the mode of thinking, have
no boundaries. Hence, even though I may want to be a great athlete or a
musician or whatever, I can fantasize about being one and yet while they may or
may not help, we cannot deny that without action, nothing is possible. On
further reflecting, action is a highroad to self – confidence and esteem. Dave
Ramsey talks about the
‘snowball effect’ in his book,
“The Total Money Makeover”,
which basically speaks about getting rid of debt by taking care of the smallest
one first and then slowly moving on to the largest. While he speaks of this
mainly in a financial context, I think this principle holds true in many other
aspects of life as well.
The key is to be fired on and experiencing that sense of
fulfilment when you accomplish something or something you achieve, it should be
fuel to take your game to the next level. Take for example when you have made
your
‘To – do’ list and when you have done it, you get that feeling that
‘Yes,
I can do it!’ The only danger to this is to stop and not move on after
experiencing that first victory, thinking that it is the first and the last to
be achieved. But as I wrote in my previous blogpost ‘One life to live – Part 2’
[if you have not read it, do check it out,
https://insightsfromacommonman.blogspot.com/2021/08/one-life-to-live-part-2.html], we are either
growing or stagnating, there’s nothing in between; the message is obvious.
Perhaps the problem is more of a lack of commitment which
is mainly due to a lack of discipline. We live in an
‘instant culture’ where
everything is at our beck and call because of which putting in the time and
effort into something that we want to pursue seems like a daunting task. For
such people, there’s no patience with the good things that insistently demand
an investment of time. For such people, the delay of gratification seems
unbearable. The truth is that we cannot achieve anything of value unless we
invest it with freedom and allow it the kind of time it needs to full develop.
All the things that season our character – love, trust, friendship and
faithfulness – must come freely through the medium of time or they doe not come
at all. Life moves towards freedom, towards healthy and responsible
independence achieved only by those who commit themselves to a participation in
the sacred mystery of time.
It is surprising that we rebel against those perennial
forces that are essential to fully human lives. Sometimes we want to control
our lives and programme our future at the high price of eliminating all
surprise. The Bible, on the contrary, is filled with many examples of waiting –
waiting for the seasons, waiting for the harvest – rather than hurrying things
up. Trying to expedite things unnecessarily would be like using chemicals to
forcefully ripen fruits which obviously is unhealthy.
Thus, in as much as being or finding
ourselves in uncomfortable or cumbersome situations can be burdensome, maybe
its time to switch our thinking and mindset as to what good we can draw from
it. Fair enough, our initial reaction to it would be one filled with uneasiness,
whining, grumbling and sulking but to allow ourselves sink into it is not going
to help. That’s why the next part to this post/reflection is going to focus on
what are some practical things we can do individually to face adversity or a crisis
(stay tuned). Until then, God love you! Stay Blessed!
