Changeablity

As much as your will can determine you bad you will strive and survive through your life, you may live under the delusion that you can fix everything that isn't perfect. Our thoughts are powerful. The time negative thoughts can prevent you from achieving your goals, actually the mind can also do pretty much the opposite. Cool, isn't it?

 

In life, you will almost certainly face deep adversity. There’s loss of opportunity: the chance that doesn’t work out, the illness or accident that changes everything in an instant, the result that turn your life unpredictably. There’s loss of dignity: the sharp sting of prejudice when it happens. There’s loss of love. And sometimes there’s loss of life itself.

The question is not if some of these things will happen to you. They absolutely will. And I want to talk about what happens next. About the things you can do to not continue to screw too bad, no matter what form it takes or when it hits you. The easy days ahead of you will be easy. It is the hard days (the times that challenge you to your very core) that will determine who you are. You will be defined not just by what you achieve, but by how you survive. 

 

To relate the subject, I want to refer psychologist Martin Seligman about three P’s. Personalization. Pervasiveness. Permanence. Which are critical to how we bounce back from hardship. The seeds of resilience are planted in the way we process the negative events in our lives.

 

Personalization is the belief that we are at fault. This is different from taking responsibility, which you should always do. This is the lesson that not everything that happens to us happens because of us. The second P is pervasiveness. The belief that an event will affect all areas of your life. There’s no place to run or hide from the all-consuming sadness. And the last P is permanence. The belief that the sorrow will last forever. For months, no matter what I did, it felt like the crushing grief would always be there.

 

We often project our current feelings out indefinitely. We feel anxious. And then we feel anxious that we’re anxious. We feel sad. And then we feel sad that we’re sad. Instead, we should accept our feelings. Just keep in mind that they will not last forever. My friend  once told me that time would heal, and for now I should lean in to the suck. It was initially a good advice, but not really what I meant by lean in. And also I don't believe time is a variable of healing. It's does not feel right. Just because someone say it's true doesn't make it's true, right? Well, and yeah. Time does not change anything unless you do something to change it.

 

Finding gratitude and appreciation is also one key to resilience. People who take the time to list things they are grateful for are happier and healthier. It turns out that counting your blessings can actually increase your blessings.

 

Afterall, we are selfish, base animals crawling across the earth, but because we've got brains, if we try really hard, we can usually aspire to something that is less than pure evil. And when the challenges come, I hope you remember that anchored deep within you is the ability to learn and grow. You are not born with a fixed amount of resilience. Like a muscle, you can build it up, draw on it when you need it. In that process you will figure out who you really are and you just might become the very best version of yourself.