When everything goes wrong
I used to have this idea of a karmic life where there was a limit to the amount of shit that one had to deal with in life. As I aged a bit, through my own experience and others, it seems to me now that’s not the case at all.
Life has this inherent quality where the probability of things going south seems idempotent. Just because things went wrong in one aspect at a point in time, doesn’t mean it won’t go bad in another aspect and time. More often than not, multiple things go wrong at the same time. And such situations tend to repeat.
Some schools of thought recommend having a stoic disposition and having a middle ground in emotional and physical responses to any situation - good or bad. I have tried this approach, but it seems a bit at odds with my persona and values. I felt that not reacting enough to any situation, even good, just because I wanted to have a state which can handle the bad as well, prohibited me from having deep human experiences.
Through the setbacks, I have felt that even if an event leaves a significant trauma, if experienced properly with all the sadness and grief that comes with it, there is a real possibility of post-traumatic growth. This growth then strengthens what psychologist Daniel Gilbert calls our emotional immune system. And it’s not just there in “strong” adults. My spouse who is a Clinical Psychologist and researcher found that such growth is possible even in children who survived traumatic events.
The general disposition that I have built now thus is rooted in courage and hope with a higher degree of openness to all human experiences and a deep intent to act as per my values even in the darkest of times, because I won’t know how long before things turn around. I recall this quote from Viktor Frankl, as something that he discovered about himself while undergoing atrocities in a Nazi concentration camp - “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.”