"Resilience," says Tim, my therapist. "That's what you have." Sometimes he expresses what sounds like admiration about how I'm doing in the face of certain obstacles, and I wonder what his game is. Is he propping me up so that I feel great about myself at the end of our hour together? Or is he being genuine?
"You're resilient," he tells me and asks what it is I think makes me so.
I've been seeing Tim a short time – just since my daughter came home from wilderness therapy a few months ago – but he knows a few things about me, like that I'm a widow and a father of three young adults with obstacles of their own, and that their obstacles (the larger of them) sometimes become the substance of our sessions.
Tim’s question recalls a podcast I’d been listening to earlier about being "continually thrown out of the nest." It’s from Pema Chodron’s book When Things Fall Apart, a book I read shortly after my wife died and need to read again:
"To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man's-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again. From the awakened point of view, that's life."
Earlier in this same reading, Pema says, “We think that if we just meditated enough or jogged enough or ate perfect food, everything would be perfect.” This is the nest we’re all building, the one we’re going to get thrown out of anyway because no matter how right we do everything, no matter how much yoga, meditation, and green vegetables I shove in my body, things are going to happen that I have no control over.
"Sooner or later, we're going to have an experience we can't control: our house is going to burn down, someone we love is going to die, we're going to find out we have cancer, a brick is going to fall out of the sky and hit us on the head, somebody's going to spill tomato juice all over our white suit..."
Put more succinctly, shit happens. And I’ve noticed that, with the passage of time, I’m more easily able to recognize when it’s shit I have no control over. Maybe it’s about getting older, or maybe it’s just about practice.
A person’s happiness doesn’t necessarily correlate to his or her circumstances. Someone who faces a myriad of difficulties will often be more at ease than someone who appears to breeze through life unpummeled. The difference is in each person’s acceptance of circumstances beyond their control. As Sam Harris points out, “During the normal course of events, your mind will determine the quality of your life.”
Happiness, it seems, is an inside job.
The more I struggle against things beyond my control, the less happy I am. In those instances, I try to practice acceptance. For me, this requires some amount of work – talking about the thing, writing about the thing, prayer, meditation – it’s not always easy, and I’m not always good at it, but I do practice, which I think is the key. Pain, as the saying goes, is inevitable; suffering is optional. I don’t like suffering.
As Pema illustrates, we are all being thrown out of the nest in countless ways, big and small. I was fortunate enough to learn the value of acceptance at an early age and had been practicing for a while when the universe really socked it to me. I may have appeared, to the casual observer, to have a well of resilience, but it was really just a lot of practice. And I’m still practicing.