If you could break your life into episodes, how many of those have thrown you completely off balance and sent you down the wrong path? I could imagine anyone reading this, at any age could pinpoint at least one, if not many that have disturbed their focus and caused them a lasting trauma.
Maybe you were bullied at school, which made you hyper vigilant for the rest of your days, constantly searching for threats on the horizon. Maybe your trust was betrayed by someone you put your faith in and you vowed never to let anyone into your inner circle ever again. The traumas we go through are endless, but the point I am trying to make is the common factor in it is you alone, and your reaction to them.
I understand that certain traumas are near irreconcilable — the sudden or even gradual loss of a loved one, emotional abandonment in or outside a relationship, these are difficult to process on an intellectual and emotional level. We look for reasons why, undoubtedly suffering guilt at all the things left unsaid. We are seared by grief and lose a connection to ourselves when the foundations of our life are shaken to the core. It’s a long road back.
What I am talking about though, is starting small. Think about the daily flow of events and micro aggressions you face: you are verbally abused by your partner, you get a parking ticket, someone flips the bird at you in traffic. All good reasons to get a flush of adrenaline and a spike in your blood pressure — you feel assaulted and you may dwell on that feeling for the rest of the day, or even longer. And for what?
Come the hour, come the teacher. If you treat all of these things as lessons and pay attention in class, you will understand the nature of experience; your attitude to phenomena is what shapes your reality. You are neither a passive observer or a fully functioning participant but you do have agency. By taming your response, you are able to tame experience and hopefully get on with your life in an unperturbed state. That’s far more important.
Non-reaction is a super power — it’s the answer to Newton’s third law that when two objects interact, they apply forces to each other of equal magnitude and opposite direction. And again, this is not a passive stance but rather an active one — you receive the assault, absorb it and if possible, negate it in your mind and move on. It’s neither denial or dismissal but an active receptive state.
This is not to make light of real world problems that seem to coalesce with every given day and others have probably said the same idea far more persuasively and better. It’s good to remember though that 80 per cent of your worries will never come true (and the rest is climate change).
Yes certainly, we are living on a dying planet and in our lifetimes, we may yet experience truly cataclysmic conditions that unravel the carefully constructed and beautiful complexity of our lives. The only answer is to take control of your own life.
With that in mind, my advice is don’t sweat it. Keep an open mind, be receptive, help others wherever you can and focus on the small victories that make up a good day. Life is many days, as TS Eliot once wrote and every one is an opportunity to contribute to your own happiness and the collective good.
May I wish you a good day. Rinse and repeat.
