Inevitable and Optional
Pain is inevitable, but misery is optional!
~Leadership Pain, Samuel Chand
In Forrest Gump, after a particularly heart-breaking episode with his lifelong love and friend, the main character decides that he just needs to go on a run. So he does. He just starts running from coast to coast and back. I forget exactly how many times he does it, but there’s a montage in the movie of him running, gaining a following, and dispensing his peculiar wisdom along the way.
At one point, a man is talking to him, trying to get inspiration for a bumper sticker business. As he’s talking, Forrest runs right through a pile of dog crap.
Man: Whoa! You just ran straight through a big pile of dog shit!
Forrest: It happens.
Man: What? Shit?
Forrest: Sometimes. [narration] And some years later I heard that fella did come up with a bumper sticker slogan and he make a lot of money off of it.
There’s a lot of unexpected wisdom in those words. Things happen in life that we cannot control. Sometimes, it’s good stuff. Other times… not so much. I’m sure we can all think of something that has happened in our lives that fits into both categories. There’s nothing we can do about it; it’s inevitable. However, the inevitability of crappy stuff happening does not equal a long road of despair and misery.
As today’s author reminds us, misery is optional.
This is certainly in line with Stoic thinking that we cannot necessarily control our environment, but we can control how we respond to our environment. If we really think about it, there’s very little that we can control in life, as much as we would like for the opposite to be true.
All we can really control is our own responses. We can do our best to put ourselves in optimal situations, but we still can’t control what happens. We can eat healthy, exercise regularly, maintain incredible stress control, and still be diagnosed with cancer. We can keep a pristine house and keep up with the maintenance, and still lose it all to a fire. We can be kind to everyone we come across, generous to a fault, and still have people talk poorly about us behind our backs. All we really control in life is how we respond. We control ourselves… and even that isn’t a guarantee for some people facing dementia or other diseases that ravage the body and mind.
So, we can go through life with the expectation that there will be pain. It’s going to happen. If we love, we will hurt. If we refuse to love, we’ll find a different kind of hurt. How we respond to the pain is what matters.
If we wallow in self-pity, we will endure a life of misery. If we learn from the pain, we can be better prepared for the future and grow as a person. Some of life’s greatest lessons are the ones that are hardest to learn.
Pain will come; that’s inevitable. What you do with it is up to you.
