The best part of my work is the opportunity to teach life skills and make friends around the world. I am a champion of people and know for certain that regardless where on the planet I wake up, the people I meet will be 93 percent the same as everyone else.
One of life’s biggest challenges comes from dealing with the negative emotional events that sprout from mortality’s unpredictable meanderings. Every day the roulette wheel of sorrow spins around and the ball drops into the slot of an unsuspecting victim. These sudden ruptures implode the status quo, forcing change upon us that results in severe, emotion-driven reactions.
To absorb and deal with these sorrows, the mind must travel a circuitous route like a bus that makes four stops. The four are:
- Changes over time.
- The Panic stage.
- The Acceptance stage.
- Flourishing under the new reality.
There is a natural order to life’s expectancy: the young shall bury the old. When this order suddenly reverses — and the old must say goodbye to the young — we suffer enormously.
Accidents happen. When they do, they cannot be reversed. The bitter reality of loss is thrust upon us.
These days an additional insidious foe is raising its head more frequently: self-destruction through chemical means. Liquid and powder chemicals might create artificial happiness but fuel the growing monster of longer term sadness. Wounded self-esteem and damaged self-image lead to depression. Depression leads to dark alleys populated by the villains of hopeless despair and thugs who rob a person of his or her determined will to live.
Lacking skills that fuel coping and resilience, increasing numbers of people are becoming vulnerable to the back-sliding of optimism and hope. These diminished life energies take place over time, but eventually manifest in something happening that is often deeply negative.
When we suffer the loss of someone we love or have come to know and care about, our initial reaction when we hear the news is strongly emotional. This is the Panic stage, where emotions flood the heart and soul.
Some things in life we will never get over and getting over them is not what success looks like because scars are part of living. What we need to do is focus on getting through it; and in order to get through it we have to trade the emotions of the Panic stage for the logical realities of the Acceptance stage. If you cannot change it, you must accept it. Acceptance helps the heart and mind jettison the crushing burdens of sorrow. The quicker you can move from emotion to acceptance, the better off you will be.
Once we reach the Acceptance stage, we are free to — in the words of my late friend George Simmons — “Push on.” Pushing on does not mean forgetting; it simply means we recognize that mortality is unpredictable and sometimes bad things happen to good people. It is always easier to tell others what to do than make those choices in our own lives, so others might self-destruct. Regardless of its genesis, the natural order of life involves the ability to weather untimely loss.
When we ‘push on,’ we are empowered to remember our absent friend fondly, forget their human frailties, accept finality as unchangeable, realize that one of us will bury all others, and live each day to the fullest. We honor and cherish the memories. Above all, we push on.
When something happens that disrupts life’s status quo, help yourself and others around you by “being there.” Be there to help escort people around their four-step journeys back to a better place. All of us must travel this wheel of change, but all of us travel the circle at different speeds.
In closing, remember that we all take turns in the barrel. Be there for others in their times of need and they will be there for you.
Ocean Palmer