Tag: bad news

Better Than This

I habitually make broad unclear distinctions between “little me” and “mature me.” The distinctions are often blurry and hard for me to act on in the moment.

I want to be a paragon of peace and tranquillity. I really do. However my troublesome and messy human tendencies frequently get in the way and foul up my plans.

I would love to spend the holidays awash in feelings of unlimited love and kindness that the season promotes. I really would.

So when an offhand remark hits me right in the gut and tears well up in my eyes, I am not at all good at dismissing the insult. I will, of course. But it will take time.

I have learned to manage disappointments in this way. I prepare to receive what I am pretty sure is bad news. The bad news lands. I absorb it and try not to react right away. That gives me time to feel and work through my uncomfortable reactions.

Sometimes I play a game in my head of timing how long it will take to for the negative feelings to subside and go away completely. I think about how I am likely going to feel the next day and in the coming days and calculate whether the insult has had sufficient impact to last until then.

Maybe it was an “it will only resolve next week” kind of insult. I am never 100% sure in the moment.

Whatever the time frame, I am forced to move through uncomfortable feelings with the hope and knowledge that they will eventually go away.

Part of me wonders why I can be so thin-skinned. A trauma history likely. My emotional boundaries often seem to be as strong as cheesecloth. Easy to penetrate.

Or maybe it’s because I missed the crucial development stage of learning self-regulation in my childhood. I’m working on it but like many other things taken up for the first time in adulthood, it is harder to learn and stick to.

It is Boxing Day. (When I was younger, I imagined that it was a special day when some sort of big and public pugilistic contest was regularly held.)

Since my day started off a bit rocky with a bit of an emotional boxing match, that minor altercation will define the day for me. I am still in deep insult processing mode.

The holidays are a special time of year certainly. They also take place in the midst of our regular day-to-day lives. The New Year approaches with its annual opportunity to think about the year gone by, let go of the old that we are happy to bid farewell to and welcome in the new… whatever we think awaits us.

I look forward to the annual changeover as I do every year.

I should be well past processing “little Margot’s” hissy fit of today by then.

Good News, Bad News

One constant I’ve come to rely on in life is universal truth. Certain stories circulate and resurface regularly on our radar because they hold wisdom or guidance that all humans can relate to. Writers who tap into universal truths often present more resonant stories because there are nuggets of truth relevant to all human experience.

A universal truth is something that resonates with all humanity. It’s something that others can relate to and/or can be a lesson that we’ve learned. We may sometimes recognize something as a universal truth but are not always able to understand it initially. Thus the belief that time increases wisdom as we see a universal truth repeated in different contexts over our lifetimes.

Universal truths reflect something essential about the human condition or key events in people’s lives, including birth, death, emotions, aspirations, conflicts, and decision-making.

Universal truths help us understand life better and also help us deal with emotional and psychological challenges. We may come to realize that much of what we encounter in life is not entirely what it seems at first – good or bad.

When my friend Anrael Lovejoy recently published a post about an old Chinese proverb colloquially known as the “Good News, Bad News” story, I was happy to be reminded of it. https://anraellightheartedvoice.substack.com/chat/posts/a0da9da1-bc2f-4207-92d5-75eee44a4344

For more context into its Asian origins, I present the story below as I found it on the internet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_old_man_lost_his_horse

The story is about a Chinese farmer who loses a prized horse (bad news) but the horse returns to him with many other horses (good news). His son breaks his leg trying to break one of the new horses (bad news). Then war erupts, and due to his impairment, the son is passed over for conscription (good news). And so it goes, in perpetuity.

We might recognize the essence of this story in our own culture as the platitudes of “clouds with silver linings” or “blessings in disguise.” The story becomes relatable when you apply it to situations in your own life.

For example, we are mid-move. A heinous process as many transitions are. So much upheaval and stress and not being able to find things and disrupting routines accompanied by a general disintegration of one’s sunny and steady personality. Speaking personally.

This week, a fridge was delivered and meant to fit between two existing cupboards. The fridge was a half inch too wide to fit in the assigned space. The modifications required to make it fit would have been amateur and tacky looking. Accch! We gave the problem twenty-four hours. And voila. We decided to take out the dysfunctional existing cabinet and plan to replace it with one that will be much more useful to our needs.

Earlier in the move, our painter tipped over a full gallon of dark blue paint on a light brown carpet. Acccch! I watched in horror as the deliciously dark paint seeped across and into the carpet. The funniest part was me bolting in a huff to a hardware store to buy “cleaning” products to remove the stain. Ya. That’ll happen. I returned the unneeded products the next day.

The solution? The carpet was eventually taken up and replaced with laminate flooring. It is a much more hygienic and sensible long-term outcome for our health and comfort. Our lungs won’t be aggravated by dust whenever we walk into a room. The “disaster” became a gateway to a better solution.

You may be thinking those changes cost money. You would be right. But here is another universal truth. Anything that makes your living space more comfortable and practical is an investment worth making over the long run. These changes add value. That is a win in my view.

In the case of both the ripped-out carpet and the dysfunctional pantry cabinet, the replacement will serve us much better. Our initial bad news became good news longer term.

Writer Rudyard Kipling summed up this phenomenon in our culture in his legendary poem, If, published in 1913. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If%E2%80%94 “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster, And treat those two impostors just the same.”

One element of learning necessary lessons to achieve maturity, Kipling suggests. I most heartily agree with him.