Blogocentric Formulations

The Importance of Perspective

When faced with adversity, have you ever lamented your misfortune, asked yourself how [whatever it is] could happen to you? Have you ever cursed your luck, your God, or fate for the cruel twist that has visited such pain and anguish upon you? How often do you see an obstacle in your path and view it as an inconvenience or even a punishment? When bad things happen, it's all too easy for us to revel in our misery and wonder why things suddenly took an unexpected downturn or why such unfortunate circumstances could possibly have happened to us.

But, when we look back on our lives, how often can we say that the good moments, the great times, the successes we've had are what have defined us? Aren't we made stronger and more resilient from those tough times? Don't we learn more from the trials we face? I don't know about you, but I can look at the person I am today and see the direct influence of events like the passing of my grandfather, being laid off from my job, and even the stupid decisions I made in my teens and twenties where I realized, "Wow, I'm never going to do that again!" I'm not sure I actually learned anything from the great moments in my life. Sure, they were great and felt great, but I don't think I became a better person or learned any valuable lessons by winning a spelling bee, or optioning a screenplay, or successfully cooking a delicious meal for my wife. (By contrast, I learn a great deal about how to fail miserably at cooking a delicious meal for my wife every time I ruin a recipe. ) If you were to ask someone to list the defining moments in his or her life, there might be a few successes in there, but I bet there would be a whole lot more failures, trials, struggles, and adversity in that list.

Which makes me wonder... assuming we recognize the eventual value in arduous experiences, why do we go into them lamenting our luck and cursing those who put us in those situations? Won't we eventually get through the tough times and emerge smarter, wiser, better people for it? And yet so often we wallow in our misery, spending so much time and energy feeling sorry for ourselves when disaster strikes.

Imagine if we could bypass that period of dejection and self-pity, and immediately start looking for not only ways to solve the problem, but what we can learn from it and how we can better ourselves from it. If you lose your job, why spend days, weeks, or even months feeling sorry for yourself? Start sending out new applications and ask what it was that led to you being laid off from your last job. Even more importantly, if you've been looking for work for some time and aren't having any success landing a new job or even an interview, start asking yourself what it is that's preventing you from getting those interviews. Your resume or cover letter? The types of jobs you're applying for? The places you find these opportunities to apply? Similarly, if you break up with someone, there is clearly a time and place to grieve... but there's also a time where you pick yourself up, put yourself out there again, and maybe even look at yourself and realize that there's something about yourself you want to change the next time you're in a relationship.

I realize this may sound suspiciously like one of those, "just look at the brighter side" or "find that silver lining" kind of messages, and it really isn't meant to be. The point isn't to make light of the struggles that people endure, and it's not always easy. There are some downright shitty things that happen to good people in this world, and it would be insulting to just tell those people to keep their chin up and try to learn something from sexual abuse, the loss of a child, complete financial destitution, or any of a hundred other horrors that some people experience.

What I am saying is that, in the grand scheme of dealing with unfortunate incidents, what if you could abbreviate the five stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance) by focusing on acceptance and the ways in which the experience, however traumatic, will eventually make you a stronger, wiser, smarter, better person? So many of those steps to dealing with grief are rooted in how you're feeling now, in the emotions that you feel as you look back on what just happened and reminding yourself about how bad it's making you feel. What if, instead of all that, and as painful as it may be... what if you could wake up tomorrow and tell yourself, "That happened and it sucked, but a year from now I'm going to look back and realize that I learned something from this experience. What is that thing I will learn, and what if I could apply it to my life today?"

I don't think anyone wishes bad things would happen to them. But bad things do happen; it's inevitable. At some point in our lives, we are all tested in one way or another. Imagine a world where people learn lessons from those trials and apply them to their lives today. Would our anger, our bargaining, our depression, even our denial be lessened if we accepted that these things happen and immediately started looking for a way to overcome this obstacle by learning what that obstacle has to teach us about the way we live our lives?

Sometimes, a little change in perspective can make all the difference in the world... maybe even the difference between a very long period of depression or anger and the beginning of the healing and growth process.