It is the nature of my body to get old, break down, and die. This may sound morbid, or defeatist, or obvious, and perhaps it is. It is also true. Whether I like it or not, these things will happen to me, just as they happen to every human being.
This is not to say that I want this to happen. I eat well, exercise, and take care of myself to prevent it from happening as much as possible. I want to remain healthy and capable, to avoid pain and illness, and to live a long life. But I also know that no amount of effort will prevent my body from eventually failing me. That is simply my nature as a human.
There are many things we wish were otherwise. We want people to be kind and considerate, especially the people we love. We want our relationships to be free of conflict. We want the people we care about to understand us, and we want to understand them. We want to be healthy, to avoid suffering, and to protect the people we love from harm.We want there to be justice in the world. We want people to be treated fairly. We want good things to happen to good people, and we want those who cause harm to be held accountable. We want our efforts to matter and our lives to turn out well.
These are reasonable wishes. A lot of what we wish were different about life is painful, and so it makes sense that we would want it to be other than it is. Conflict hurts. Losing people hurts. Watching someone struggle hurts. It is frightening and uncomfortable to think about our own decline and death. We have good reasons to want things to be otherwise. But wishing things were different does not make them different. Our bodies will age. People will disappoint us. Our relationships will involve conflict. Bad things will happen to people who do not deserve them.
That there are painful parts of life is not revelatory. However, we often know these things to be true without fully experiencing them as realities of our own lives. Intellectually, we understand that these things can happen. At the same time, our expectations, our emotional responses, and the way we move through the world often tell a different story. We live as though the life we want is the life we should expect, and as though the things we do to protect it can keep the harder possibilities at a distance. We may know intellectually that this isn't true, yet continue to experience the world as though it were.
Perhaps this is because we move beyond hoping that our actions will help us get the outcomes we want. We come to experience the world as though our actions will secure those outcomes rather than simply influence them. In the process, we can lose sight of the possibilities that remain beyond our control.
There is a reason this way of seeing the world is so compelling. Our actions really do matter. Exercise, eating well, and taking care of ourselves improve our health. Care and attention strengthen relationships. Our choices can reduce harm and make the world better. But these connections between what we do and what happens are not guarantees. No matter how well we care for our bodies, they will eventually decline. We can love someone well and still lose them. We can work hard and act with integrity and still experience profound unfairness.
Somewhere along the way, we can mistake influence for determination. We begin to treat our actions as though they determine outcomes rather than influence them. When reality fails to conform to this model, painful outcomes seem to require an explanation. We look for the mistake we made, the warning sign we missed, or the action we should have taken. We may look for someone or something to blame.
Sometimes there is something to learn or a mistake we made. But painful outcomes can also occur when we have done nothing wrong. When this happens, we may search for an explanation that preserves our belief that the right actions should lead to the right outcomes. We may understand, in theory, that life is unpredictable and unfair, yet continue to interpret our own experiences as though the right choices should protect us from these realities.
The consequences extend beyond disappointment. When we see the world through a lens that doesn't match reality, we can make decisions based on what we believe should be happening rather than what is actually happening. We can spend years trying to make a relationship work without recognizing that the other person may not want the same thing. We can treat every physical limitation as a problem to solve rather than a change we must learn to live with. We can blame ourselves or others for painful outcomes that no one could have fully prevented. We can put off difficult decisions because we believe things will work out if we keep doing what we have been doing.
None of this means we should stop trying to influence things. I will keep exercising, eating well, and taking care of myself. I will keep trying to be a good husband, father, doctor, and friend. I will keep working toward a world that is more just and less painful. These efforts matter, even when they cannot guarantee the results I want. The challenge is to work to make life better without expecting our efforts to exempt us from the difficulty of being alive.
We cannot prevent all the painful parts of life. But we can stop treating every painful outcome as evidence that something has gone wrong or that we have failed. We can recognize the difference between how we believe the world should work and how it actually works. We can spend less time trying to force life to conform to our expectations and more time responding to the life in front of us.
Love,
Doc
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