was cut short. Many people despised him, and in the end, he was very much alone and died a horrible death. A more recent example would be the Dalai Lama. He seems like a very happy and peaceful human being. But he has gone through difficult times. Many of the people he loved have been killed or tortured.
So, it isn’t as if everything is going to run easily once we reach a point of living a happy life. That isn’t how it works. How can we deal with disaster or heartbreak that enters our lives? That is what matters most. Even when tragedy strikes, we want to deal with it so our lives still proceed beautifully,.
If we live long enough, we will encounter tragedy of some sort. We may lose loved ones, most likely our parents. We may suffer accidents. Some people die quickly but most of us are going to get illnesses and die over an extended period. Very few of us are going to have thirty to forty years of a steady job, after which we retire with the financial means to live well for the rest of our lives. Most of us have ups and downs along the way; we get things, we lose things, things go well, and things don’t go so well. This is life.
So how do we deal with tragedy so we can maintain our happiness? Three steps will help. First, we recognize misfortune is part of life. Second, we do what we can to improve the situation. And three, knowing we’ve done what we can, we carry on. That all might seem easier to say than do, so let’s look at these three in more detail.
First, we have to accept that, no matter what we’re given, no matter how well things are going, sooner or later tragedy will hit. Thinking that we can reach a place where we avoid tragedy is a mistake. It is going to happen. That’s the main thing: accepting that life is sometimes not going the way we want it to.
Acknowledging that misfortune is going to happen is important. Saying it’s unfair or shouldn’t be happening is just going to make us suffer needlessly. When we live, we do suffer; it’s part of life. Accept this.
It’s not necessarily that we’re doing something wrong. Life includes things that can’t always be prevented; others can make unwise decisions that affect us. But there might be things we need to learn and change. We all make mistakes, and they usually have consequences that hurt.
For example, when people drink and drive, they are usually not trying to hurt someone else. But sometimes they do—their drinking causes them to lose control of their car, get into an accident, and hurt someone. Yes, they made a mistake, but it isn’t going to do them any good to say, ‘This shouldn’t have happened.” And if their accident involves another person who was, unfortunately in the wrong place at the wrong time, that person also won’t be helped by saying, “This shouldn’t have happened.”
But it did. “Shouldn’t have” deals with the past. It’s done, over, can’t be changed. Our happiness depends upon now, the present. We need to recognize bad sometimes happens so we can move to the next step. After we’ve acknowledged we’re not exempt from tragedy, we can stop fighting it. It is happening, and so we need to work with it.
Second, we see what we can do to make the situation better. What do we have in our power to rectify it right now?
For example, if we got into a car wreck with a drunk driver and it wasn’t our fault and now we’re in the hospital, we need to get well and become physically fit. So, we go to physical therapy, do the exercises, go to our doctor’s appointments, do our treatment, and focus on getting our bodies better. If we need to go to court for the situation, we will. We won’t be focusing on what went wrong; that’s in the past and will only keep us stuck. Instead, we concentrate on making the present better by healing ourselves.
Let’s flip the scenario. If we were the one driving while drunk who caused injury to another, then we must recognize our part, see how we can prevent that happening again, and take appropriate action. We look at our behavior and see what caused us to drink and drive. The number one way to preclude us from being stuck and repeating the same behavior is not beating ourselves up. Part of learning from the situation might be getting involved with therapy or maybe meditating. It’s going to be proactively doing things to change our behavior so we don’t do it again. We may have to make financial reparations for the damage we’ve done; we may have to apologize to the people that we’ve hurt and their families. But we don’t beat ourselves up. We just do what we must to make things better as much as we can. We have to differentiate between what we can fix and what we can’t. Then we let go of what we can’t.
In either case, after we do what needs to be done to get healthy again, then we enjoy life as much as possible. In the hospital, we could talk with the people that are visiting us, read good books, watch movies that make us laugh. Later, we also get outdoors in nature if we can. Mostly what we’re spending our time doing is just living life and not even thinking about the tragedy. Even if we’re in a wheelchair, no matter how bad that tragedy is, we can do things to make it better.
Think of relationships. Almost everyone is going to go through a breakup or divorce. When someone we love wants to end our relationship, what do we do? We see if we can do something to repair the relationship. We might ask if our partner wants to go to counselling; if we both can talk about it and the other tells us what we did wrong, we can work towards rectifying our behavior. Mostly what we do is focus on what we did wrong so we can do better. It’s not to beat ourselves up but. We want to learn from our mistake so that next time, if the other takes us back or if we get into a new relationship, the behavior that was dysfunctional from our part changes for the better. We change it by learning from our missteps.
For instance, if the mistake is that we picked the wrong person, we try to be more scientific about whom we choose and not just let our emotions rule. We change our behavior and thinking and choices that don’t serve us well. If they aren’t healthy, we see if there is something we can do differently in picking a new partner so we will have a successful relationship.
Let’s use the example of illness. Let’s say we go to the doctor and we are told we have cancer. So what we proactively do in this situation is research it on the Internet and speak to our doctors. We look at what we can do right now to make our bodies heal. Then we do that, after which we need to move to the next step. This step is about living well now. After we have worked to do everything within our power to fix it, we then have to live life, and we mostly give that tragedy little or no energy.
Three, we move on. We have recognized that invariably tragedy enters life, and we have done what we can. Now, we carry on with life.
Regardless of the tragedy, our dealing with it often involves grieving. As a clinical psychologist, I have found that grieving for about 5 percent of the day is all we need to get well. If, instead for example, people grieve all day long, they tend to be depressed and are not getting better. Grieving is essential towards healing, but it is not something we do continuously; it’s a small part of our day, an important part. We can spend a bit of time grieving—or even feeling angry—but mostly we just live.
After a tragedy, our minds will want to go over the accident, breakup, illness, or whatever over and over. Each time we think about it, we can say, “Hmm. Can I do anything about this right now?” If the answer is no, then we don’t need to think about it. We drop the thought right then and get back to living. If we’re going for a walk, we just walk; if we’re with our friends, we’re just with our friends. We don’t sit around bemoaning the loss. That only keeps us stuck. What we need to do instead is get out there and be active, heal, and distract ourselves. There is time for healing, but there is mostly time for living.
People do tend to spend a lot of time after tragedy just grieving and, thus, staying stuck and not getting better. To get out of this rut, we ultimately distract ourselves with something else. This isn’t about distraction in an addictive sense, though. An addictive distraction would be: “I feel bad. I don’t want to feel like this, so I’m going to take this.” Whatever “this”
