This Too Shall Pass

My friend hurt his back a couple of days ago. He had breezed through a tough workout at the gym and was doing some simple task at home when he “tweaked” his back. In the course of our conversation, I offered my sympathy and reminded him that the pain was “only temporary”.

Everything is after all. Even good stuff.

The temporary nature of everything is one of those proverbial good news/bad news things. Good news, it’s only temporary! Bad news…it’s only temporary.

As a culture, we place considerable value on permanence. We prize owning over leasing…tenure over annually renewable contracts. We even prefer our best friends to be forever.

We approach new or unknown situations with apprehension. Our fear that we won’t get what we need or will lose something we value walks hand-in-hand with all change–even ones we might characterize as positive. We cling to ideas of permanence. Time for another tattoo.

It is perhaps this characterization of things as good or bad that creates our challenge. When we specifically define our ideal–that job, that house, that relationship–we are essentially assigning a negative connotation to any alternative outcome. This black and white thinking doesn’t comfortably allow for possibilities we haven’t considered. Tough in a world painted in grey.

Add to this that we are extraordinarily adaptive creatures with advanced deductive reasoning.

It’s this reasoning that generally guides us to believe we should stick with “the evil that we know”. We reassure ourselves thinking at least we know what we are dealing with.

Here’s the problem with our attachment to permanence…evolution. We are hard-wired to take every bit of insight, intelligence, and stimuli (pleasurable or not) and learn from it. Be better for it. Evolve.

In short…we, too, are meant to be only temporary.

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