Better Off?

Tragedy and trauma happen all of the time, and they suck by definition, otherwise it wouldn't qualify as a tragedy or trauma. It can be anything from something as trivial as an unexpected bad grade to something as major as becoming paralyzed in a car accident.

Are we better off after these things happen?

I've been struggling with this question for a while and it has been bugging me. I've been wanting to write about it, but I couldn't think of what to say that I believed was true.

I asked my friend Ellen whose daughter Hannah was on the same track as the Boy, but a few years earlier. I remember sitting with Ellen at Zoka near U Village, sitting across from her at the table while she cried and told me the story of her daughter's substance abuse issues and how she was in wilderness therapy in Utah. Fast forward three years and her beautiful, healthy and sober daughter is heading to college in the fall.

"Are you better off that this happened?" I asked Ellen one day.

"Yes," she said. "I am glad that it happened. I was a white knuckle alcoholic and I had to face my own sobriety when my daughter was facing hers. It was the best thing that could have happened."

Oy. How could Ellen reconcile her daughter going off the rails as the best thing that ever happened, because clearly, going off the rails for drug and alcohol abuse is not a good thing. At all.

"We never would have addressed these issues in our family if it hadn't been for our daughter's issues," said Ellen. She believed it so firmly, that I had to believe it was true. As much as I have a hard time reconciling the notion that bad things cause good outcomes, there is truth in that Ellen and Hannah probably are better off since Hannah's addiction was treated.

And yet...philosophically I had a hard justifying bad things happening for the sake of personal growth. Should I be glad I tore my ACL because it taught me...patience? No. Tearing my ACL and getting surgery sucked and I wish I hadn't torn it. Was it because Ellen's daughter found more growth and meaning in her recovery, whereas my ACL was more of an inconvenience, not a spiritual journey?

Last night at 3:00 when I was awoken to the viaduct being torn down (Seriously. Three a.m. on a Sunday morning), I had a flash

Are we better off after these things happen?

It is the wrong question to ask. Instead, the right question to ask is

How have I grown since this bad thing happened to me?

I got this idea last month when I was reading an article in Harvard Business Review of all places about employees experiencing grief, which is a hot topic on my mind as I am going through some pretty heavy grieving now about the Boy. Near the end of the article, the authors discuss the idea of post-traumatic growth where we can learn from the horrible things that happen to us.

I was born and raised Catholic, and one of the hardest concepts of any religion is to understand suffering. Part of the idea of life in a sense to avoid causing other people to suffer, but also to understand that we can't experience suffering-free existence. Everyone will suffer at some point, but what is the best way to deal with it?

I am not sure I have an answer, so here is a picture of Flathead Lake in Montana.

Maybe that is the best answer I have right now. If I can't get rid of suffering, maybe I can at least be present and enjoy my surroundings.