Your Adversity Is A Puzzle Not Bad Luck
The only way to live a meaningful life without losing your sensibilities is to flip how you view adversity. Your life feels hard because of the adversities you’re facing. The challenges and uphill battles have left you exhausted and depleted. You have no energy left for motivational speeches, and giving up seems easier than continuing.
I’ve been there — for a decade, if I’m being honest. Here’s how I look at my life now: I don’t see adversity as something that happens to me out of bad luck. It’s simply something that happened. I believe whatever occurs in my life is the outcome of countless events unfolding into a consequence that happened to impact me. Sometimes these same events unfold but affect someone else entirely differently.
Every adversity is a problem to solve. When I’m short on money, I sit down and analyze the possible paths forward. Which paths align with my moral code? Which am I avoiding out of cowardice? Which should I take but don’t want to? Which demand upgrading my skills and will lead to progress? Answering these questions well gets me one step closer to where I want to be.
When I struggled with physical strength, I asked the same questions: What can I do? What’s the right way, and why can’t I follow that path? Then I figured out a method that combined what I wanted with what I should do when those two things differed. This simple exercise has helped me gamify my life to the point where everything becomes a puzzle. As long as I don’t lose the people I love, adversities have limited impact because I know there are things I can do and things I cannot.
Either change the circumstances you dislike or accept the way things are. Philosophy and religion can help cultivate acceptance. Action-oriented plans will help you solve problems. So solve more problems in your life. Sit down with pen and paper, write down your major problems, pick one, then ask questions until you have none left. Answer them all. Identify the gaps and resolve one question at a time.
It’s this feeling of solving things, answering questions, and searching for answers that will empower you to face any challenge in your life and eventually overcome it.