No Matter What Life Decides to Hand Me I Will Handle It
Reminding myself of this has taught me to worry less
If you live long enough you see a lot of things go wrong. Life takes off-ramps you weren’t planning on taking. People make decisions that affect you adversely, and you have no control over it. You lose people, places, jobs, money, or other precious things. It would be easy to become cynical.
But when you live long enough you also begin to see that no matter what life throws at you, you figure out how to bounce back. Humans are resilient. Most of us have the strength to endure hardships that we didn’t know we had until we were faced with them.
I remember reading a book in the ‘90s by Susan Jeffers called End the Struggle and Dance with Life. Her premise is that we can not only survive but thrive no matter what life throws at us. One of the greatest lessons I have learned — and the one I hang on to when things get tough — is that I will handle whatever happens when it happens. This saves me from “pre-worry”, or “forethought of grief” as Wendell Berry puts it in his beautiful poem The Peace of the Wild Things.
I can do hard things. You can do hard things. We have done many hard things in our long lives. And the more things we get through and survive, the more resilience we build and the…
