What to do when life deals you a bad hand

The Self Salutation Newsletter

Greetings and salutations!

We’ve spent a lot of time looking at the idea of changing your relationship with yourself in the last couple of months, so today I want to shake things up a bit and look at another relationship most of us don’t think much about: your relationship with life.

Before we go there, however, I have two quick announcements…

First, last week I spoke with Olympic athlete Kami Craig on the podcast she hosts, The Mindful Warrior Radio. We had a deeper-than-usual conversation about the Self Salutation, which you can listen to here.

Second, I want to let you know that I’m still on track for launching the Self Salutation App this Friday, May 3! Stay tuned for a special announcement about that on Friday.

Okay, onto this week’s message…

What’s your relationship to life like?

We don’t tend to think about it as a relationship, per se, but we all have a relationship with life itself, and this it’s one of the most important relationships we have.

What’s the state of your own relationship with life? Do you love the life you have?

Do you feel hard done by?

Do you struggle to accept some of the things that have happened to you?

One of the biggest ways this relationship can get into difficult territory is when we’re dealt what feels like a bad hand.

The feeling that fate has been cruel to you can be a hard one to get over. It can seep into your consciousness and sour your spirit in a profound way.

I think we’ve all encountered people like that—who seem to have just never recovered from some hardship.

My grandfather was like that, or at least that was the story I grew up with.

Cheated out of a family business

By the time I came around, all my grandfather did was sit in his recliner all day long either playing solitaire or watching TV—or doing both.

Oh, and he yelled at us all to be quiet when news about the stock market came on.

To be fair, he was in his mid-seventies by the time I remember him, and I think in his generation that fate was common.

Still, it was his dour mood that struck me.

When I asked my mom why grandpa was so grouchy, the story I heard was that his cousin betrayed him.

My grandfather was groomed to take over his father’s business but just before that happened, this nefarious cousin forced them to liquidate.

My great-grandfather—who had built the business up from nothing—had a heart attack and died a few days later.

It literally killed my great-grandfather.

And apparently it killed the spirit of my grandfather. He never recovered from the experience.

Oh, and he didn’t work again either.

Wait, say what? You mean, he retired at 43?

Basically, yes. Somehow he walked away from the takeover with enough money to never work again—which makes the whole story far less of a hard-luck tale to my mind.

I don’t know much about the ins and outs of my grandfather’s story, and I’m not here to judge him, but with broad strokes you can certainly paint of picture of a man who was incredibly fortunate in life but let a single episode of misfortune cast a shadow on the rest of his life.

Bad luck can be like that if we aren’t careful.

“The gods are against me” syndrome

I call the state of feeling that life treated you unfairly, “the gods are against me” syndrome.

Now and then people email me that they don’t believe in gods. So just to clarify… it’s a reference to Greek tragedies, not a theological claim.

The feeling that you’ve been sentenced to a cruel and unusual punishment is a hard feeling to shake when it lands on you.

And when I hear people’s stories the reality is that many people endure suffering that is truly mind-blowing.

It’s not a revelatory thing to say, but life can be incredibly hard.

Still, you will find that often it’s those who endure the greatest hardships who walk away from those experiences with the lightest spirits.

Meanwhile those like my grandfather—who actually had quite a fortunate life—carry a grudge with life.

One key to getting past the syndrome

Today I want to share one key insight that can help you move past the feeling that fate has been cruel to you.

One of the reasons we struggle with fate is that we feel robbed of a fate that we anticipated or felt entitled to.

For my grandfather, that was owning a big business and enjoying great wealth because of it.

When we imagine one future and pin our sense of happiness on that fantasy of what will be, we do feel robbed when it’s taken away.

But what has really been taken?

Just a dream, a fantasy.

Furthermore, when you examine more deeply what you wanted, you will see that in the heart of it what you truly wish for is not that thing itself but a kind of fulfillment or satisfaction you anticipated from having that thing.

And here’s the key: life never takes away your actual ability to attain a certain fulfillment or satisfaction—it only takes away one route to achieve this.

If you want that fulfillment, you can find it through some other route.

Like my grandfather. He could have built up his own business and had even more satisfaction than what he would have gained from inheriting a thriving business.

So the satisfaction was still possible, just not from the route he expected it to come from.

In other words, to make peace with life, it’s necessary to trust that fulfillment will come when you release your attachment to that fulfillment coming to you in a specific way.

The first step in accomplishing releasing this negative feeling is to pay close attention to what’s going on when you notice yourself feeling the “gods are against me” feeling.

The more intensely you feel frustrated with life, the more tightly you must be holding on to a vision of how fulfillment will come to you.

You might have all kinds of good reasons why that is the way you want it.

Life does not respond to our demands, but life will always afford us the opportunity to attain a state of fulfillment—if we release our grip on how that should come about.

Next week, I’ll share a little more about this topic by exploring the false bind that accompanies this syndrome.

The false bind is the feeling of being stuck between two impossible alternatives which often accompanies “the gods are against me” syndrome.

In the meantime, hopefully these reflections and my grumpy grandfather will help you to make a step towards reconciling yourself with your own life’s situation.

Peace,
Simon

P.S. Don’t forget to check out my guest appearance on The Mindful Warrior Radio with Olympic athlete Kami Craig: you can listen to it here.