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How Challenging Times Can Help Us Connect With the Core of Who We Are
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“Perhaps the most important thing I learned in more than a thousand hours of interviews is that a life transition is a meaning-making exercise.”
Bruce Feiler
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Lifequakes
They are the transitions and moments of disruption that offer unique opportunities for insight and wisdom.
The constant handling of big and small obstacles and setbacks, ironically, is what provides meaning to our lives. It is almost as if a Gateway or threshold has to be crossed, signifying the commitment of the journey from the ‘Hero’ who is able to successfully complete the ‘test of life’.
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Autobiographical Occasions
Life transitions are the interesting chapters of our internal autobiographies, that provide us with the opportunity, tools and the reason to transform ourselves for the better.
We need to take small steps, or ‘microsteps’ to accept these transition moments, visualize and plan out the change, shed our old ways, unveil our transformation and the resulting new self, and to storify the entire transition.
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Sharing Our Story Is Healing
Sharing our transition, transformation and the obstacles we were able to overcome is a crucial step that heals.
A study in 1986 that persuaded people to write about their traumatic experiences revealed that many started crying during the writing process, but it worked like a catharsis, and led to their understanding themselves better and eventually getting healed.
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Gratitude And Rituals
- A feeling of profound gratitude towards whatever good one’s life has to offer, however small, contributes towards people finding meaning in their transition.
- Rituals provide the space and the ‘container’ by which a demarcation is created, and the outside world is not hindering, creating a safe zone to get healed.
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Happiness Is Fleeting
- Happiness is not something permanent or even graspable. It is a temporary, fleeting phenomenon, focused on the present.
- Finding meaning is like stitching together the past, present and future and knitting a coherent narrative, a story that makes the journey of life a worthwhile endeavour.
- The true meaning of life is when it gets uprooted in the pursuit of something sacred and transcendental or some higher calling.
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Transition is difficult
Transition, even the completely voluntary, can be a source of intense suffering because it involves adapting to new situations and changing your self-conception.
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Transition, as an in-between state
Transition is also called liminality by psychologists - a state where you are neither in the state you left nor entirely in your new state. This in-between state creates an identity crisis, even in good transitions.
But they are really a predictable and integral part of life and happen regularly. Author Bruce Feiler interviewed hundreds of people and found that a major life change happens, on average, every 12 to 18 months. Even huge collective transitions such as the pandemic occur with regularity.
In retrospect, most transitions are seen as positive
In hindsight, even the unwanted transitions are usually seen to have been a success.
Research shows that we tend to see past events as net positives over time. Even the most challenging transitions have some positive fruit. It may just take some time to see it.
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3 kinds of happy lives
- The pleasant life: you fill your life with as many pleasures as you can. This has hardly any contribution to lasting fulfilment.
- The life of engagement, where y...
Habits Of Supremely Happy People
- They surround themselves with other happy people.
- They cultivate resilience.
- They appreciate simple pleasures.
- They devote some of their time to giving.
- They get immersed in activities that bring joy.
- They nix the small talk for deeper conversations.
- They make a point to listen.
- They look on the bright side.
- They make exercise a priority.
- They listen to good music.
- They spend time in nature.
- They laugh a lot.
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The blue mind
A "blue mind" is a mildly meditative state characterized by calm, peacefulness, unity, and a sense of general happiness and satisfaction with life in the moment, that's triggered when w...
Water gives our brains a rest
- The sound around us, from an auditory perspective, is simplified. It's not quiet, but the sound of water is far more simple than the sound of voices or the sound of music or the sound of a city.
- The visual input is simplified. When you stand at the edge of the water and look out on the horizon, it's visually simplified relative to a city you're walking through, where you're taking in millions of pieces of information every second.
A meditative state
The water could be inducing a mildly meditative state of calm focus and gentle awareness.
When we're by the water, our brains are held in a state of mild attentiveness. In this state, the brain is interested and engaged in the water, taking in sensory input but not distracted by an overload of it.