The Inevitable Storm

Adversity and how to prepare for its arrival

Mind Candy is a newsletter on practical philosophy and human flourishment—aka how to live “the good life.” Each month we tackle a new theme.

Introduction to Monthly Theme

“Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.”

William Shakespeare

Life will knock you down.

A family member becomes sick and you need to stop everything to assist. The stock market crashes and you’re unsure how your portfolio will recover. You’re let go from your dream job in a round of mass layoffs.

Unexpected experiences, misfortunes, and obstacles hide around every corner of life.

These are the moments that tend to jar us awake, moving the ground beneath our feet. Where once we felt steady, we easily can feel wobbly or even get knocked down.

When we’re in these moments, it’s hard to see outside of them. We know adversity will occur, we know there is life on the other side of it, and yet in the moment, we tend to have tunnel vision, unable to see past the event.

Part of this is because we’re not sure what the other side looks like. This uncertainty hinders us from looking beyond.

The other aspect is that when adversity strikes, depending on its severity, we cannot focus on anything other than the issues at hand.

When we’re caring for a sick loved one, we don’t want to imagine what life looks like after this. We want to fix the problem, we want life to resume how it was prior to the issue.

“For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them,” Aristotle once wrote.

This is the hard reality of dealing with adversity. The only way to succeed is through.

Yes, adversity comes in many shapes and sizes. It shows up as obstacles, setbacks, loses, and errors.

But it also teaches us courage, strength, resilience, determination, mental fortitude, and dedication.

For the month of March, we’re exploring the theme of adversity and how we can tackle the situations that arise unexpectedly.

To start us off, we’re diving into how to handle the inevitability of adversity.

Everything in life faces some form of struggle.

Animals attempt to escape being prey while simultaneously looking for food to survive.

Trees and plants fight to grow in harsh conditions, requiring water, sunlight, and nutrients.

Modern human continue to struggle but in different ways—for freedom, to master the constant change of life, to understand the purpose of our lives.

Struggle is a natural part of life. And while the struggles we face are filled with pain, heartbreak, and stress, they build us into stronger individuals.

Adversity may seem like flaw, but it is in fact a feature of life. No one lives life without experiencing it.

So the question is, how do we handle it?

The Search for a Smooth Flow of Life

It’s not a question of if you will experience adversity so much as when you will experience it.

Adversity is built into the nature of life. Everyone experiences obstacles and scenarios outside of their control that they were not expecting.

The key, a Stoic would say, is being able to handle these events as they arise.

Our aim, according to Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, is to have a good flow to life. In other words, we’re looking to build ourselves, and our resilience, to be able to handle any event as it comes so as not to interrupt our inner tranquility.

The best way to do this is to approach the situation at hand and respond by grabbing the right “handle”, as Epictetus would say.

“Everything has two handles, by one of which it ought to be carried, and by the other not.”

Every situation has a response that helps and one that hinders.

When a relative becomes sick and needs help, do we take appropriate action for them by calling doctors, studying their diagnosis, and advocating for them?

Or when we are laid off, do we wallow in the pain or take action by reaching out to our network, revising our resume, and sending out resumes for a new one?

We all know those people who seem to magically land on their feet no matter what happens to them. They turn lemons into lemonade. It is about making the most of the situation at hand, by trying to take back control and take the steps necessary to overcome the scenario.

Each situation has an appropriate approach, one that will help us, and another that won’t. Our job is to try and aim at the right “handle” as much as we can.

Make the decisions today that your future self would thank you for.

Anticipate and Prepare for the Adversity

Seneca advises that one should always prepare for hardships by practicing the situation we’re afraid of.

We do this first by accepting we will not escape adversity. We will not escape pain. We will not be able to ignore situations we don’t want to be in.

This practice does two things.

First, it grounds our mind in the expectation that something will happen. We’ll lose money, family, or a job. Our car will break down on the way to work. Our significant other will leave us.

Second, by ensuring our mind is prepared for the inevitable, if and when the situation does occur, we’ve blunted its force.

What once could have knocked us off our feet is but a mere blob as we’ve been practicing and preparing for its arrival.

It’s Possible to Overcome

When we’re in the thick of it, it’s hard to determine how we’ll get through to the other side.

Sometimes we encounter events that we feel will break us, that we can’t surmount.

But Marcus Aurelius advised himself that if others have handled it, if others have encountered the scenario and overcame it, then it is possible to do so.

“Not to assume it's impossible because you find it hard. But to recognize that if it's humanly possible, you can do it too.”

No one had ever run a mile in four minutes. Then, in 1954, Roger Bannister did. The year after, three more ran it. And the year after that, even more.

Adversity will make it seem impossible to overcome. But if someone else could do it, it means it is possible.

Situations may not be identical, but just the fact that another overcame something similar often gives us the positive boost we need to push on.

It Can be Transformative

Once adversity has struck, our lives are forever changed. There was the us before the event and the us after.

But who will we be?

That’s up to us. We can either transform ourselves through the event or be transformed by it. One is in our control, the other is not.

In 1954, Jean-Dominique Bauby suffered a stroke. Waking from a coma 20 days later, Bauby would discover he was completely paralyzed except for partial movement in his neck and eyes.

Bauby inspired millions when he documented his journey with “locked-in syndrome” writing his memoir, The Diving Bell and Butterfly, communicating each letter through nothing more than the blinking of his left eye.

Obviously Bauby would not have wanted the outcome of the diagnosis, life was clearly better before the stroke. But he chose to teach the world what it was like to be him, to suffer like he did, and to preserver.

In his book Greenlights, Matthew McConaughey writes an important lesson someone once told him.

“It is not about win or lose, it is about do you accept the challenge.”

That is life.

That is adversity.

It’s not about somehow beating it. It’s not about winning. It’s about getting through as best as we can. It’s about looking straight into the face of the issue and saying I’m not backing down, I accept the challenge and I will grow from it. I will control my destiny to the best I can.

Adversity will always strike, and it tends to do so when we least expect it. But if we can mentally prepare ourselves ahead of time, if we can dull its force when it arrives, then we give ourselves a stronger chance of not only overcoming it, but being transformed for the better through it.

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Until next time,

D.A. DiGerolamo

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