Life is Hard, and Then We Die


"Life is hard, and then we die". Ever heard that one before? As lame as it sounds, it’s true. Life is hard! Crisis happen all over the world every single day. The number of potentially breaking events that unfortunately do happen every single day, is an incredibly long list. The death of a loved one, natural disasters, addictions, evictions, loss of employment, disability, injury, illness, abuse, financial struggles, etc. Although we can't always control what life throws at us, we can control how we will react to what is thrown. We all handle crisis a little differently. Take this home owner for instance, "For days, wildfires raged through our area. We had to evacuate our home for nearly a week. When we returned, we discovered that hundreds of homes had burned down in our neighborhood. Driving around, words like "disaster" and "crisis" kept coming to mind. Yet a smile brought a moment of relief as we drove by one burned-down home. The owner had put up a home-made sign with the words "Terminate free at last." (Lauer, 286). Every family and individual handles life's curve balls in their own way.  For this home owner, humor was a relieving outlet from a catastrophic event.
Stress, pressure coming against you from either inside or outside you, is inevitable when crisis come. However, not all pressure is bad. In fact, it is the pressure, the stress, in outer space that helps keep astronauts alive. Without it astronauts would float away, suffocate, experience distressed blood pressure, bone loss, and muscle deterioration, to name a few. The more pressure we can handle, the stronger our ability to cope becomes. The same goes for trees. The stronger the wind blows the thicker the trunk grows.
              It all boils down to how you choose to perceive it. That’s right. It’s up to you, and your mind. Things can be made a whole lot better or a whole lot worse depending on how you decide to take it. For example, there was a man waiting in an airport terminal. His flight was delayed and so he decided to purchase a small, overpriced package of crackers to munch on while he read a magazine and waited. He set the package of crackers on the table in front of him before leaning back to read. He was getting into the featured article when he heard rustling in front of him. He lowered his magazine just enough to see the man in front of him eating a cracker. He was caught a little off guard but figured the man must have been very hungry and decided to ignore it. A few minutes later the rustling came again. Lowering the magazine, he saw another cracker enter the man’s mouth. A little irritated, he tried to ignore, but not before shooting the man a stern look. Again, the rusting came. “That’s it!” he thought. He reached forward and took a cracker before the other man could, shoved it into his mouth, and without hesitation shot a glare at the man. He then shook out his magazine and raised it to read again. “Take that!” he thought. A few minutes later the rustling came again. Feeling his ears burn, he slapped his magazine down on his lap, scooted the last two crackers across the table toward himself and instructed the man to “stop!”. Before returning to his magazine he placed the second to last cracker in his mouth and chewed, hard. Various flights began being called. The man across the way picked up his things, and before leaving said, “Go ahead and finish them. The last one is all yours”. Feeling incredibly miffed, the man thought “Well of course it’s mine. All of those silly over priced crackers were MINE!”. He shoved the final cracker into his mouth and slapped his magazine down on the table in front of him in a huff. As the magazine hit the table, there was came a rustling sound from underneath it. Odd. The man raised his magazine, to find his package of six crackers, untouched, right where he had placed them. He had been eating the other man’s crackers.
 Your feelings do not result from events. Your feelings result from your thoughts about the events. In a way it could be compared to a placebo pill. The pill itself makes no real changes, but what a person thinks about the pill does. The exact same fire burned down thousands of homes in the example given earlier, however not everyone chose to think of it as a total crisis. When an individual or family changes their mindset over a struggle, it becomes less of a struggle and more of a learning opportunity. Opposition is a catalyst for growth. Crisis can either make us or break us. We decide. 

Lauer, R. H., & Lauer, J. C. (2011). Marriage and family: The quest for intimacy. New York: McGraw-Hill Higher Education.
Lauer, R. H., & Lauer, J. C. (2011). Marriage and family: The quest for intimacy. New York: McGraw-Hill Higher Education.
Lauer, R. H., & Lauer, J. C. (2011). Marriage and family: The quest for intimacy. New York: McGraw-Hill Higher Education.

             

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Divorces are Damaging but Not Damning

It is never a couple’s intention to end in a divorce when they are staring into each other’s eyes exchanging marital vows on their wedding day. Nevertheless, divorce does happen. If you are married and this is your first marriage, you have about a 35% chance that you will divorce the person you are married to. In 1970, divorce rates spiked as the No-Fault Divorce laws were put into place. These laws allow a divorce without anyone being at blame in the marriage. Prior to these laws, one of four things had to be happening in a marriage for a divorce to granted by a judge. They included: abuse, adultery, abandonment, and alcoholism. If one of these four things were not taking place prior to No-Fault laws, a divorce would not be granted. But now, thanks to those laws, the marriage bond is weaker and looked at as a more temporary set up. Today, couple could get a divorce granted simply on the grounds that they are tired of each other. People who divorce once are more likely to divorce aga...
Read more

Needed: Parents!

One of my all-time favorite questions to ask on a date is "What form of punishment did you receive most as a child?" I've always just thought it was a funny question but now that I think about it there is a lot one could learn about someone from it. Such as, how wild of a child they were, or how their parents raised them. People often parent similar to the way they themselves were parented. Personally I was issued a time-out sentence more often than anything else. No parent goes home from the hospital with their first child and truly knows what they are doing. As a result every single person on Earth was raised differently than the rest. Throughout time various alternative parenting has been tried. Before WWI it was fairly common for well-off English households to employ a governess to help raise and educate the children. In Israel, a kibbutz was another form of raising and training children. Boarding schools, finishing schools, child care professionals for 70 years ...
Read more

Make It Do, or Do Without

For whatever reason, a large majority of the people in the world are not satisfied with what they have. In some ways this is good. It causes us to reach for something greater, but honestly, I think it often just makes us break one of the Ten Commandments, "Thou shalt not covet". It has the potential of blinding us to the immense blessings that each of us has around us. Every one of us, no matter our SES (Socioeconomic Status) has much to be grateful for. A person from a low SES may look at someone from a high SES and wish they had the free time of someone from a high SES. A person from a high SES may see someone from a low SES and envy the exact same thing, both assuming the other has it better. Both ends of the SES spectrum are faced with resource management challenges and must decide what they will do with what they have. In a family, managing resources can be quite a challenge. Picture a single mother on the low end of the spectrum. She may desperately need an incom...
Read more