Sh*t Happens: Dealing with Discomfort and Change

You will do the right things, give it your all, and still come up short. People you counted on will let you down. Your plans will get dashed and your goodwill will get used. Some mornings you'll be flooded with enough that you don't want to get out of bed.

There will also be glories. The work pays off. People surprise you. You get love and joy. All of it moves. The sun goes behind clouds, the storm comes and doesn't rage forever, the seasons turn whether you're watching or not.

So the question isn't how to stop the weather. It's what you do when it turns.

We are built to avoid discomfort. On a dark day you want to move heaven and earth to bring the sun back. On a good one you want to bolt the sky in place. And somewhere you picked up the idea that if you can't make good things happen, something must be wrong with you. Some books will even tell you the problem is your own thinking, that your beliefs are blocking the life you want. That's a clean way to make the ache your fault.

Here's what I keep running into. Most of what sets us off day to day is not a threat to our life. Someone criticizes a call you made. No one sees it your way. You don't get the thing you wanted. It stings, and the body braces like it's a tiger. It isn't. But we treat the discomfort as the emergency, and then we pile on. We panic, we deny it, we lash out, we go numb, we eat the whole pint.

The reactions are the extra misery. The weather was going to pass on its own.

None of this is a stiff upper lip. Denying what you feel is its own way of leaving. So is bracing for the other shoe to drop. The move I keep coming back to is smaller than any of that. Stay in the storm without adding to it. Feel the discomfort without needing to do something about it right away.

It's going to happen to you. It happens to all of us, all the time