When you are striving for greatness — be it in your studies, your profession, the mastery of a skill or pretty much any worthwhile endeavour — at some point you are going to get derailed.
Life is beautifully messy. If you have never been derailed by external forces, internal battles, bad luck, bad decisions or something coming completely out of left field, then you probably haven’t lived very much. One of the foundations of Buddhism is the Four Noble Truths, the first of which is essentially that suffering and dissatisfaction are an unavoidable part of human life. Now, that can sound a tad bleak at first… But spend any time around Buddhist monks, and you quickly discover they are often laughing, joking and generally having a joyful time. So I think they may be on to something!
We all have a philosophy of life. How well we have actually articulated it to ourselves is another matter!… but we all have one. Personally, my views lean toward a mixture of Absurdism, Zen Buddhism, a bit of Stoicism, a sprinkle of Jung, a healthy dose of Nietzsche and the Übermensch idea, plus whatever else I happen to be reading thrown into the mix. I don’t think life necessarily owes us meaning, fairness or even a coherent storyline — but I do think we get to decide how we respond to it.
The 1980s counter-culture, coke-head comic Bill Hicks got it…
In addition, the wonderful Alan Watts often talked about life as something closer to a game, a great cosmic dance, than the oh-so-serious thing we often convince ourselves it is. That idea resonates with me enormously, and I find it particularly reassuring. In fact, the last ever thing I whispered to my incredible mum while she was in her bed dying was my own version of a little Alan Watts passage.
…and this is really where I am getting to: our philosophy of life helps us deal with shitty things like grief, pandemics, heartache, illness and all the other rubbish that inevitably happens. Coping strategies are useful, of course, but our deeper beliefs — philosophical, intellectual, religious, spiritual or whatever — sit much closer to the foundations of who we are. When shit really happens, those foundations matter.
So I guess my advice is to know yourself. Know what you believe and what you value, because that gives you something solid to stand on when life gets wobbly. And the only way to really know what you believe is to test it. If you are a Christian, for example, your faith will either deepen or change when you seriously question the existence of God, Jesus and the ideas your faith is built upon. The same applies to any philosophy. You cannot shy away from the big questions just because they are uncomfortable. None of us can conclusively prove what life is, why we are here or what any of this ultimately means… but I still think it is useful to believe in something. Pure nihilism has never struck me as a particularly joyful way to spend a Tuesday.
So what else helps when life turns to shit? In my experience, Stoicism, gratitude, confidence, Zen and my increasingly Camus-esque taste for Absurdism have all helped me enormously. I have also learned that resilience really is a skill. I, like many of you, have had some bad things happen to me and have made plenty of mistakes. But I have learned from them, and more than anything, I refuse to let difficult experiences make me cynical about being alive — which, admittedly, is harder than it used to be when you look at the state of the world.
Cynicism is often called the thief of joy, and I think there is something in that. The way I see it, cultivating joy and practising gratitude are two of the most useful habits we can develop if we want to live a genuinely good life. They do not make grief disappear, cure illness or somehow protect us from mental-health problems, but they can change the way we meet difficult experiences and help us remain connected to what is still good, meaningful and beautiful when life gets rough.
And while I’m dishing out unsolicited life advice… please don’t take yourself too seriously. Being alive is weird.
As a reminder, watch this…..