How instead of Why

When life is hard, we often find ourselves harping on “why” questions: “Why is this happening to me?” In those moments, Elaine Fox (author of Switch Craft: The Hidden Power of Mental Agility) suggests letting go of the “why” and asking “how” instead: “How can I change this situation?” Or perhaps you’re already asking a “how” question, but the wrong one: Instead of “How do I stop working so much?,” she explains, try an easier question: “How can I find time to go to the gym?”

Kira Newman writing in Greater Good

Hiding Endings from Ourselves

We avoid endings whenever possible, and we steer clear whenever we can of the neutral-zone emptiness. Endings feel like failure to us, and at a deeper level. So we use the busyness and structure and status of work and family life to hide ending it from view. Believing in doing so that if we just keep adding and adding to what we have, we’ll end up with something new and will avoid the need to make any endings.

But it is not just endings that we fear. The aloneness and emptiness that are often felt in the neutral zone are just about as fearful for many modern people as endings are. Whenever we can’t see that anything is happening—and you usually can’t in the neutral zone—we doubt that anything can “really” be going on.

We fail to see that real new beginnings, the kind that revitalize and inaugurate a new order of things, come out of that chaotic neutral zone.

William Bridges, The Way of Transition

Fists pounding the hard earth in agony

Looking through the shadowy foliage of Gethsemane, we don't see the classic portrait of Christ, rendered by the artist. We don't see Him in a snow-white robe kneeling beside a big rock, hands peacefully folded, with a look of serenity in His face as a spotlight from heaven illuminates His golden-brown hair. Instead, we see a man flat on his face, fists pounding the hard earth in agony. We see a fact stained with tears and dirt, hair matted with sweat, facial muscles contorted in  pain like the gnarled, twisted olive trees looking on. God was never more human than at this hour. Have you been in the dark garden of Gethsemane? Betrayed by  a friend? Deserted by those around you?  Felt abandoned? Lonely? The next time you think no one cares, pay a visit to Gethsemane and see the man of sorrows. Because seeing God like this does wonders for your suffering. 

Charles Swindoll, For Those Who Hurt  

Plenty of reason for doubt, anger and sadness

All of us — whatever our natural serotonin level — look around us and see plenty of reason for doubt, anger and sadness. A child dies, a woman is abused, a schoolyard becomes a killing field, a typhoon sweeps away the innocent. If we knew or felt the whole of human suffering, we would drown in despair. By all objective evidence, we are arrogant animals, headed for the extinction that is the way of all things. We imagine that we are like gods, and still drop dead like flies on the windowsill.

The answer to the temptation of nihilism is not an argument — though philosophy can clear away a lot of intellectual foolishness. It is the experience of transcendence we cannot explain, or explain away. It is the fragments of love and meaning that arrive out of the blue — in beauty that leaves a lump in your throat, in the peace and ordered complexity of nature, in the shadow and shimmer of a cathedral, in the unexplained wonder of existence itself. 

Michael Gerson, published in the Washington Post 

Daily Rituals

Here’s the true secret of life: We mostly do everything over and over. In the morning, we let the dogs out, make coffee, read the paper, help whoever is around get ready for the day. We do our work. In the afternoon, if we have left, we come home, put down our keys and satchels, let the dogs out, take off constrictive clothing, make a drink or put water on for tea, toast the leftover bit of scone. I love ritual and repetition. Without them, I would be a balloon with a slow leak.      

Daily rituals, especially walks, even forced marches around the neighborhood, and schedules, whether work or meals with non-awful people, can be the knots you hold on to when you’ve run out of rope.    

Anne Lamott, Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair