(This is the first of two messages about the need to be resilient in daily life.)
My wife is fond of saying, “If it’s not one thing, it’s TWO things!” It’s a good saying. 
It’s amazing – only a day after my sister-in-law’s funeral, my mother slipped, fell and broke her hip while visiting us. Emergency surgery was required, and now my mother is recovering in the hospital.
CHANGE IS GOOD? YEAH, RIGHT
All our family summer plans have been turned upside down by recent events. It makes me wonder, what’s the point of planning at all? If our plans can be thwarted so easily, who bother? Whatever plans we make will only be modified, over and over again.
Life’s like that. We start something with a specific goal in mind. Then we find we must change course. When the project we started is finally complete, the result is often entirely different from what we initially set out to accomplish.
As John Lennon wrote, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”
WHO’S REALLY IN CONTROL, HERE?
Recently, I’ve been living in “react” mode, dealing with events thrust upon me and my family as they appear. I generally hate having my plans upset. (I’m not a control freak or anything, but when I can’t accomplish what I want to accomplish, I become frustrated, like most people – I’m only human!)
So having this many pivotal events happening at once has left me tired (from lack of sleep) and aggravated (from lack of time to absorb it all). Even worse, I’ve become angry at times with people I care about, like my mother.
My feelings about her accident have been wildly contradictory (but then, feelings are illogical). I’ve been variously:
- Angry at her (how dare she go and fall like that!),
- Saddened by her pain (she’s in misery!), and
- At times even unconcerned (it’s her problem, not mine).
This last response bothers me most, because I think of myself as a caring person, and my lack of concern for my own mother has made me wonder how caring I truly am. I wonder if I am becoming indifferent to pain, in general.
CHANGE & PAIN – LIKE DEATH & TAXES
I’ve been thinking about pain these days – my wife’s emotional pain in grieving for her sister, my mother’s physical pain with her broken hip, and my own pain of fatigue. One thing I seems clear – no one chooses to suffer, if given a choice. Suffering is something that finds us that chooses us. We do not choose it (unless we have psychological problems.)
So what do we do with pain and suffering? Do we ignore it? Can we make it go away?
MANAGING LIFE’S PAIN – WHAT’S YOUR CHOICE?
I remember hearing a Christian songwriter named Barry McGuire talk about pain, suffering and evil. He said when pain, suffering and evils come our way, it’s like “shock waves” traveling through space and time, like ripples on a pond.
We can do one of two things with these waves of suffering:
- Let them bounce off of us and onto someone else, releasing their negative energy onto others, or
- Choose to become “shock absorbers” and accept the negative energy into ourselves, so they don’t bounce off of us and damage someone else.
This, then, becomes a choice we make – do we allow the negative energy to turn us sour and affect someone else (especially those we love)? Or do we somehow find a way to deal with the pain and absorb the negative energy so it doesn’t hurt those around us?
Of course, if we’re caring people, we learn to absorb our pain and neutralize its negative effects.
So, for those of us who want to be resilient “shock absorbers” – rolling with life’s punches, and protecting those we love, what can we do?
Stay tuned – I’ll explore that in my next post…
Jeff
