Have this ever happened to you? You began work on a project and something unintended happened at the outset that felt catastrophic.
You finish the early stages of creating a spreadsheet for a project. You save at the outset so many times it seems like it is always the case. Not this time. And, when someone asks you to look at something else before you get deep into the remainder of spreadsheet project, you agree. “Need to close this out so I do not have too much open,” you think to yourself. Brain half engaged, already in the next location, you nuke rather than save your skeletal framework of the spreadsheet.
The moment you hit the key, but before you can react otherwise, you know what you have done as you look at a now blank screen. Your stomach marches out on your tongue, looks up at you screaming, “I have angry contents I want to send your way because I AM SICK. You idiot!!!!”
It has happened to me. Yes. It is a helpless, frustrating feeling. The temptation is to tell myself something lame. Something along the lines of, “Well guess I was not supposed to do that today,” or “Apparently that project should go to someone else.” Or, perhaps worst of all, some self-deprecating, falsely humble comment to myself along the lines of, “You loser. You always do dumb things like that.” That is a response coming from Little Bart, the one who also believes at other times he should don the cape.
What is the appropriate response to pain, small or enormous? Pain, real pain. The pain of years lost, which can never be regained. The pain of opportunities squandered, some of which I may never see the likes of again. The pain of relationships damaged so badly they can never be returned to their original and potential state.
For years, my response to pain was essentially to waste it. Waste it in the sense than rather than sit with it and feel it, working to mine the lessons available once the initial searing waves passed, I medicated it in some manner. Sometimes it was flight, allowing one of my character defects to take over, guiding me to some dark place – which was only prolonging the pain.
I am grateful I finally see the reality of the truth that the pain is not such a tragedy. Pain provides me the opportunity to grow, to go to places and into actions I likely would not push myself to take without the pain. No, failure and pain are not tragedies. Both are part of the potentially redemptive part of life on this side of eternity. Wasting pain, pain endured, only to feel that same, or a very similar pain again, unnecessarily (or subject others to the same or similar pain again unnecessarily), that is a tragedy!
In pain? My heart genuinely goes out to you. I hope you have someone close by who can help calm you, reducing the likelihood you will flee in some manner to avoid the pain. Sit, hurt, grow. Mine the pain for the gold it will produce in your life.
To the lessons available to pain, and the lessons available without the cape. . .
Put Down The Cape 