Some of the times of most extreme challenges of my life have been very private ones. Moments where my heart has felt near the very bottom of the spectrum of darkness, where the bullseye center of my soul has felt broken, lost, and confused. Times where the current results seem illogical given the logical preceding events. Experiencing this confusion is best seen when the trust of a child is broken. A child, who knows intrinsically as a son or daughter of their parents, believes time with their mother and father should be a safe, sense-making, refuge from the world. When that trust is broken and time with their caregiver becomes time with their abuser, there is a deeply emotional reaction. This reaction is a very human one that has a lot to do with safety and survival but also connection, comfort, and value.
When safety and survival is threatened, connection is severed, comfort is gone, and our value seems to dissipate into worthlessness. And then, after all that, we have to react.
I use the child as an example because we can empathize with a child. Something which we all were and all have varying experiences with. We can feel the fear of a child, see it in their eyes, and possibly even feel the rise in their heart rate and the hot flush of fear by knowing the insecurity they feel in such times. We can empathize with the fear of a child in that situation because we’ve all felt our worlds fall apart. The innocence of the child and universal aspect of the child parent relationship puts words and feelings to situations we as adults struggle to express. The reaction to illogical events straying from our logical view of life comes about in many ways. Trade out the parent trust relationship with a job, health, a partner, God, or humanity and the planet itself. There is trust in those areas which means there can and likely will be let down.
Personally, I use the child because a turbulent childhood was my first event where I could see my soul trying to make sense of it all. Then, there were the many health issues I had growing up. The culmination was, as a very healthy 26-year-old who’d finally had a half decade with only stitches and broke bones, a very personal moment with just me and a doctor in a small room as he told me about a tumor that was my tumor.
Cancer at age 26 felt so illogical, especially given how I had oriented my life around being healthy. My life was aimed around loving and supporting others by helping through moments and times of hardship. All of a sudden the moments felt much less relevant when I realized my life would change and my time on earth could be much shorter than I had ever thought.
All of a sudden the idea of the permanence I might have to offer changed into a potentially much shorter timeline. Life had forced me to focus on the relevant and present problems of today - a focus needed whether dealing with an adverse childhood, a health condition, or just being a friend to those you are close to and the world alike - but I knew handling relevant issues is simply handling pieces to an entirely more permanent puzzle. Serious times often cause us to want fast fixes to our relevant problems, but the path of least resistance often causes us to feel better without being part of a greater solution - or without adding much to our life's permanence.
It is much easier to only focus on the present day, and we are often encouraged to do so. We take the ideas of current science and psychology and sociology and stir them together into a recipe of how to get through today. Or maybe we appropriately ignore them when they are just too much and begin to overwhelm us. Instead of fighting a current, we turn off our ways of responding and turn into rocks that stay at the bottom of a raging river merely in an effort to not get carried over the falls. And in this, without realizing it, through worry or ignorance, we start creating habits we will keep or someday have to challenge.
As a child who has to grow up too early or an adult who is forced to parent their own mortality far before is normal, you realize the fork of adversity in the road before you. You have to respond to the actions life has given you, going with the flow or merely digging in your heels will rapidly form the world you will have to live in. A relevant response is taking the actions needed to just feel better. As a child, this is often acting out in anger, frustration, and pain. As an adult, we see many turn to unhealthy relationships, alcohol or other substances for a simple escape, or a sour attitude towards life.
We see how relevant reactions become permanent situations. But the same of negative outcomes is also true with contrary reactions to respond to the challenge to be better. These reactions are of hope, kindness, and the ability to create a kind and welcoming space for yourself others. The good and the bad of adversity and having to choose a path is why we see among children who experience abuse or are in the foster care system having dramatically differing lives. We see both a higher statistical likelihood to end up having problematic drug and alcohol issues, becoming homeless, committing suicide, and often becoming abusers themselves when put in a position of authority, but we also see these individuals becoming resilient helpers, healers, caregivers, business people who are strong leaders, and amazing parents. It's natural with those who experience adversity to rise to the top or sink to the bottom, to be broken or built from the challenge, but not find a place in the middle. And we can learn from these reactions when we experience more mild adversities - and also learn from the mental trauma even the most successful still struggle with.
What I've experienced from health issues as an adult is that I had more control than as a child. I was freer to choose what I did and how I did it, ie the reaction, when I had more authority over my life. Or maybe a better way to say it - I could do it now rather than think of it abstractly in the future. I didn't have to choose between running away and being seen as a delinquent or waiting till my 18th birthday to be free. As an adult, I had the ability to be intentionally known in my fears and my strengths. I could choose to be open, honest, and vulnerable with my weaknesses and my skills.
I remember after my cancer diagnosis when talking to a close male friend. I was in a parking lot and we were talking on the phone. It would have been much more relevant to make a joke of cancer or to talk about being living strong and defeating the illness, but instead I told him I was afraid to die. And when I moved to San Diego to be closer to a hospital it would have been easy to focus only on enjoying each day, but instead, I worked tirelessly on a book I wanted to finish about a previous adventure in life in case it was the only thing I would get to leave behind.
I wanted a life that felt more permanent than relevant. A life which I shaped proactively rather than one which shaped me. Yes, it's important to react to the times - science is necessary to help us understand what is going on in the world, how to heal, and what to do, psychology helps us understand what is going on in our mind and how to take care of ourselves, but neither answer what to do when your soul struggles, when hope and meaning feel distant, and when you are merely wanting the simplicity of love, the knowledge that we are all dying and it's only a matter of when and if we'll have had a meaningful life before that time comes.
This all points to something we have heard many times in different ways how it's not just what we do, but how we do it. Our responses may be relevant, but were they done with a heart and soul that was thinking long term? We can look at our hands and eyes and bodies and soul and know it will someday all be old and wrinkled, or maybe just a young one gone too early and remembered by others a long time from now, and all we can do is trust that the time till then will pass.
So, it's not just what we do to have the best response to this moment but, more importantly, is who that response is making us. When life has an illogical response to logical events, are we willing to come back with an illogical response of our own of kindness and vulnerability in the face of fear and defensiveness - a response that lets the soul next to us know it's okay to be afraid and it's okay to be strong, it's okay to struggle and find out how good you've been made, it's okay to subscribe to a whole life rather than react to a single moment.
I still struggle with all this personally as new adversities feel like I need to respond here and now. I feel the need to share correct information, the need to be a psuedo-scientist or pseudo-psychologist. Again, this points towards being relevant rather than consistent. I'm finding the challenge right now is learning to focus on being both - how long term hope and our permanence as individuals confluence with short term solutions and creating of a welcoming space for others to be.
The solution I'm finding is in remembering we're part of a greater humanity than any one individual offers. When we zoom out we see we're a tiny dot among millions of people who are all feeding into a tiny sliver of the timeline of humanity - but in our own, deeply personal, deeply meaningful timeline it's okay to say we want it to matter. If we zoom out on the timeline of our life we're going to see the moments we react to with a mindset of relevance aren't so relevant anymore, but the way we react within permanence does matter. The permanence makes up the timeline of it all, makes our little blip in the world have an impact and makes the impact the world has on the rest of humanity, meaningful. In that, there's some hope in the face of hopelessness.