A close friend of mine has cancer and is exhausted—trudging every day to doctors, clinics, and hospitals for chemo, radiation, and multiple CAT scans, replete with nausea, hair loss, and extreme lethargy. It doesn’t help that my friend is 80, lives alone in a rural area, and has to be driven everywhere. I check in whenever I can.
At one point in our latest conversation, she said, after a long sigh, “I didn’t sign up for this.”
Because we have known each other for many years and have a history of deep, probing conversations, and because we’re both psychologists, I posed a question that I hoped would spark some good reflection: “What did you mean when you said, ‘I didn’t sign up for this’? The frustration, dissatisfaction, and resentment in your voice sounds like you made an agreement with life and it isn’t cooperating.”
"Yes,” she said, “I’m annoyed and aggravated. Isn’t that how many of us feel when life isn’t going our way?”
She hit a nerve. Many of us believe, or at least feel, that life owes us creature comforts, satisfaction, and fulfillment.
But is this true for everyone? Or have my friend and I—both white, privileged, upper-middle-class, educated professionals—simply inherited the entitlement gene? After all, we don’t wonder where our next meal is coming from, or ever doubt that there will be a “next meal.”
In India, where I frequently teach, the poverty—especially through Western eyes—is extreme. I see the teenage mother, in bare feet, carrying two babies, weaving in and out of the clogged-up traffic in pollution-choked Delhi. She taps on the window of my taxi, her hand outstretched, pleading for anything, a morsel of food, a ten rupee note. Is she thinking “I didn’t up for this”?
We can’t negotiate with life. It simply is. But when we don’t like the “is-ness” of life, we curse, stamp our feet, and punch our fists to the heavens. Just like little babies who are hungry, wet, or tired.
We are not little babies and life couldn't care less.
Most of us are in a constant tug-of-war with life, yanked between “I want this” and “I don’t want that.” The ancient Indian scriptures, the Vedas, speak of this as raga (attachment) and dvesha (aversion). Thousands of years ago, human beings realized that this struggle only leads to more stress, mental turmoil, separation from one another, and fatigue. We think we can have life the way we want it.
Good luck.
Each of us must take responsibility for who we are and how we are dealing with what life presents. To put it simply, we must accept what is happening to us. In us and around us. Accept doesn’t mean “like” or “love,” it simply means accept: being receptive rather than resistant to what is happening in the present, instead of focusing on the past or the future of wanting things to be different than they are.
When we are open to what is true in the moment, we have the opportunity to be released from the struggle. Life endlessly presents challenges to everyone—big ones and small ones. What’s the purpose of these challenges? For us to continue to be and become our best, highest, brightest self: the self that is here to serve the greater good.
Notice I said “be and become”—in that order. Being is about living in the moment-by-moment present. Becoming speaks to shedding unproductive, self-centered habits so that we move from living in an “I” world to living in a “we” world.
So what did you sign up for?
What Did You Sign Up For?
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25.02.2024
A close friend of mine has cancer and is exhausted—trudging every day to doctors, clinics, and hospitals for chemo, radiation, and multiple CAT scans, replete with nausea, hair loss, and extreme lethargy. It doesn’t help that my friend is 80, lives alone in a rural area, and has to be driven everywhere. I check in whenever I can.
At one point in our latest conversation, she said, after a long sigh, “I didn’t sign up for this.”
Because we have known each other for many years and have a history of deep, probing conversations, and because we’re both psychologists, I posed a question that I hoped would spark some good reflection: “What did you mean when you said, ‘I didn’t sign up for this’? The frustration, dissatisfaction, and resentment in your voice sounds like you made an agreement with life and it isn’t cooperating.”
"Yes,” she said, “I’m annoyed and........
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