Best of all possible selves?
Surely hardship makes us better
Tout est pour le mieux dans le meilleur des mondes possibles
All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds
I wrote the other day about optimism and about how I didn’t think I was foolishly optimistic for sure, but my practical outlook wasn’t totally pessimistic either. I thought maybe I was cynical, but cynics are mostly without hope. Briefly, I landed on the proposition that maybe I’m just a realist.
In my musings and meditation on the subject, I was reminded of Voltaire’s Candide. Though I read it a long time ago — high school, maybe college, I remember the line distinctly, that surely everything was for the best in the “best of all possible worlds.”
When things get me down, and life hurls the heavy and the horrible at me, I just want to fall on my ass and say “fuck.” Surely it could be better than this? But then I rationalize: my life is one of relative privilege. Others have it more difficult, and face much worse — discrimination, disease, death. Things have been difficult before. I’ve had my own issues and struggles, but I know that I can handle it. Even when it hurts.
Yet, I’ve long subscribed to the idea that the events in life, the tests and difficulties we face are always relative, that we never face challenges that we can’t rise to meet, that the hard things in life are what make us better and better. Each according to his or her capacity must grow and to that, hardship is a must.
I suppose then, that as we grow and change, grief merely changes shape. No matter what age, race, gender, socio-economic status — surely we all must face hardship, according to our own capacity?
When I taught preschool in Korea, I remember watching my little 4- and 5-year-old students have meltdowns over things that were basically inconsequential to me — a student cried because I asked everyone to turn in their coloring sheets but he wasn’t done; a student was upset when all the girls were selecting “which princess are you” and someone suggested that she was a princess that she didn’t like. At first I was mildly sympathetic and obliquely comforting when these things happened, but then it hit me — these kinds of things were literally the hardest things they’d ever faced in their young lives. I upped my empathy accordingly!
I remember vividly how difficult it was for me to deal with having no one to sit with at lunch the first few weeks of middle school. It was hell for a 12-year-old girl.
But now, as an adult, I actually enjoy eating by myself because then I get a lot more time to daydream or work on stuff I want to do (and also play games on my iPhone). If I eat lunch with a colleague or friend, great! But I no longer feel like my self-worth is tied to whether or not I have a lunch squad. Though, I do worry about skipping out on happy hour events or drinks with colleagues — because what about networking? What if I miss out on some great story? The more things change the more things stay the same.
Problems don’t ever go away — they just get more sophisticated. As T.S. Eliot wrote in East Coker, “As we grow older, The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated.”
If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t. Because the things that I went through to get me here are all the things that shaped me into something better. I wouldn’t want to lose any of that — good or bad. And the shitty things that happened are never insurmountable.
I don’t believe that the world was designed to be the best of all possible worlds. Not in the sense that it’s designed to be any sort of paradise where all our dreams come true. But in a sense, I do believe that the world was designed to make us all into our best possible selves. That the hardships and heartbreak and oh shit moments and desperate times and the you’ve got to be kidding me’s — that all those things happen to help us learn how to overcome. Because the bad things that happen do suck. They friggin’ suck.
But if we rise to meet challenges — whatever they may be, surely we can become our best possible selves.
