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Key points
- Life doesn't owe us anything.
- Struggling between wanting "this" and not wanting "that" can lead to self-centered exhaustion.
- Facing every challenge life presents is the path of growth and transformation.
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, he 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, ‘I didn’t sign up for this’? The frustration and resentment in your voice sounds like you made an agreement with Life and Life isn’t cooperating.”
"Yes,” he said, “I’m annoyed. Isn’t that how we feel when life isn’t going our way?”
He hit a nerve. Many of us believe, or at least feel, that Life owes us: creature comforts, satisfaction, 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 an infant, and a toddler clinging to her ragged sari, 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 few rupees. 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, 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 (desire, attachment) and dvesha (dislike, aversion). Thousands of years ago, human beings realized that this struggle only leads to more stress, mental turmoil, separation from one another (because of our excessive preoccupation with our own needs), and fatigue. We think we can design 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 —big ones and small ones—to everyone. What is 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?
