When All Seems Lost

“Anyone can give up; it’s the easiest thing in the world to do. But to hold it together when everyone else would understand if you fell apart, that’s true strength.” ~ Author unknown


Yesterday I ran into a friend who went through a very rough time this past year – he lost his job, his mother passed away, he went through a hard battle with his ex-wife over custody of his children, and he struggled with depression. Every time he raised his head after one blow, something else hit him from a different direction, often with not enough time in between life storms to recharge his batteries.

When I asked him how he was doing, I expected a sad answer. To my surprise, he replied that he was doing great. I am not sure if I was more relieved or surprised, and he must have seen it on my face, because he felt compelled to explain.

“When everything started going south,” he said, “I got very depressed. I even thought that life wasn’t worth living any more, and I escaped the pain by fantasizing about dying. The more I thought of it, the sweeter death appeared – a moment of pain in exchange for an eternal sleep I didn’t have to wake up from. Then, one afternoon, I went to the grocery store, and I ran into a neighbor who told me of her thirty-five-year-old daughter who was dying of cancer. Tears welled in her eyes when she told me of her little grandson who was going to grow up without a mother. Suddenly, my depression evaporated like fog in the morning sun. Here I was, mostly upset over minor affairs and wishing for death, and out there was a young mother fighting to live just another day. I was overcome with shame and guilt, and I almost fell into a deeper state of self-pity, but I quickly shook myself out of it; life IS beautiful, no matter how maddening it can be at times. I guess I was like the man who complained he had no shoes until he ran into another man who had no feet.”

Glad that my friend had been able to accept those hard moments as a natural low of life, I said good-bye and thought about the things he said.

It’s extremely easy to become overwhelmed when things start happening, especially if they are unexpected, and it is just as easy to be willing to give up. Once the first set of emotions begin to flow, they rush through every cell of our being and cloud our perception. If we lose a job we feel as if we’ve lost ourselves and our identity; if we lose our house we immediately entertain thoughts of being rejected by society; if we lose a loved one, we feel guilty for being alive while they are gone. In reality, a job and a house do not define our worth, and each of us is here as long as we need to complete whatever we came to do and learn; if we are still here, there is a reason why we are.

The trick is to focus on what we have left, rather than obsessing on what we have lost.

The Value of personal Boundaries

After so many years of being married to me, my husband takes some of my eccentricities with a grain of salt. One of the things he has come to accept is that I won’t kill anything – if I find an insect in my house, I carefully scoop it up with cup and paper and I take it outside. My take is that if it’s alive it has a purpose to exist, and I have no right to terminate whatever it is here to accomplish. Life is life regardless of its form.

This past summer, I spent a couple of weeks discouraging ants from coming into the house. After a little frustration and a few good old-timer tips, I finally succeeded. I even went as far as trying to save as many ants as I could and put them back outside, which my husband could only chuckle at. “You must be the only woman alive who worries about saving ants,” he told me one night after I spent several minutes trying to scoop up as many as I could from the dishwasher before running it. Too bad if some ended up drowning, but I couldn’t stand the thought of leaving them in there if I could do something about it.

To cut a long story short, the past week we’ve had new visitors. Although we spend $40 each month on flea-preventive medicine for our cats, something didn’t work, and a couple of determined fleas made it inside. Rabbits? I think people should use fleas as the totem animal for Easter – nothing reproduces any faster.

Unable to lure them outside in any other way, I finally gave in and fogged my house, killing all the fleas that had survived everything else. While I cleaned the house after the fogging, I thought about the extermination, and wonder how many tiny lives had succumbed to the killer fog. Craziest thing was that I was the one who had “pulled the tab” on the cans.

That led me to think about the importance of preserving personal space and setting boundaries. By setting personal boundaries, we create limits for how others act and speak in our presence. They are not designed to isolate us, but rather to keep out behavior we can’t accept in our personal space.

After we identify what our personal boundaries are, we need to make sure we express them clearly and consistently, without worrying too much about others being upset by the scale of their rigidity. People get most upset when they DON’T know what their friends’ boundaries are, rather than when they know. Once they are aware of their limits, they can relax and not worry that their words or actions might offend anyone. A lack of personal boundaries - or communication of them to the other party - can only lead to strained relationships.

Of course, it would have been impossible to explain my boundaries to the fleas, so I had to resort to more drastic measures, but as long as two individuals speak the same language, there is no reason why anyone would need to silently endure.

Embracing Change (R)

We are afraid of change. It's human nature. The fear of change—the fear of the unknown—is so great that we continue to live within the constraints of our own invisible walls.

Force of habit is a considerable influence in our culture; habit is synonymous with stability while change is disconcerting. It stirs unrest, like a storm stirs the sediment in the sea; until the waters calm down and the sediment settles back to the bottom, the water appears cloudy. We are very much creatures of habit.

We eat, work and sleep at specific times, and have squeezed in multiple other activities, with little to no room for change. In the midst of this structured life, most of us inevitably arrive at a point where change is necessary for survival. Because we never learned to easily accept change, we panic when we feel forced to make important decisions. Instead of embracing change as a new opportunity filled with adventure, we become almost paralyzed with fear.

Controlled by fear, we dig in and stay put, even if the walls are closing in. We stay in miserable life situations, feeling we don't have the strength to change anything, until something pushes us to our limit and we must make a choice.

Many times our fears aren't readily apparent. Sometimes we know what we want and pursue it with confidence, with no doubts. Or so we think. No matter how sure we are in our minds about a goal or desire, fears often lurk beneath the surface. As scary as change can be, it doesn't have to be undertaken all at once. Sometimes small steps in the right direction are more beneficial than an explosive life-altering effort. Taking small steps, one day at a time, is less traumatic than rebuilding our entire world from scratch. If we can learn to tap into our innate wisdom and intuition, we will gradually become able to discern the difference between our fears based on insecurities versus our soul trying to steer us into the flow of least resistance.

Change, and the strength to surrender to it, are an important part of our lives and should be viewed as an opportunity to experience wonderful things yet unseen.