Prepare for Tragedy

Stimuli

I recently met with a good friend for lunch who had just returned from a month-long trip to his home in Europe. The two of us are working on a side project together, so we had met to discuss progress and catch up on life.

During my friend’s travels several weeks earlier, he had mentioned to me over text that he was having trouble finding the time to focus on our project because there were some things going on with his dad. At the time I simply wished him and his family well, and did not pry further, not knowing the gravity of the situation.

At lunch that day, I had noticed that he didn’t bring it up, so, nearing the end of our conversation, after crushing our very reasonably priced $24 salad and $8 kombucha, I asked him. “So how’s your dad by the way, you mentioned something weird might have been going on?”

My friend shared with me that his dad had been struggling increasingly to speak over the past several months, and during his time in Europe, he had been diagnosed with a very specific type of dementia that attacks the part of the brain that controls speech.

The disease is called primary progressive aphasia (PPA), which slowly deteriorates the patient’s ability to use language to communicate. The best estimates show that this disease only affects 0.002%-0.0035% of people every year. Today, my friend’s father can still understand everything, formulate thoughts, actions, walk and hear but his speech specifically is being slowly eroded.

PPA is a progressive disease, meaning the symptoms generally worsen over time. Eventually, people who have PPA may become unable to speak and completely lose the ability to even understand written or spoken language. Sadly, there is no treatment for this disease, only ways to slow the progression.

I cannot speak for everyone’s relationship with their father. But in my own experience with my father, the man who raised me, who drove me to school every morning for 15 years, who taught me to be a man…to have to watch him slowly lose his ability to communicate is not an experience I would willingly endure.

Situations like this can elicit many feelings:

Confusion: We are good people, how could this happen to me and my family?

Anger: How did my dad get this disease, the likelihood of which to contract is infinitesimally small?

Anxiety: I only have so much time left to build memories, converse and connect with my dad like I’ve been able to up until now. Should I move back to live near home to spend more time while he has these years left?

More than anything, thoughts like this elicit deep sorrow: All I want is to have my old dad back. How will my family and I get through this?

Not something we enjoy thinking about.

Response

My natural response in situations like this is to offer my condolences, love and support, then move on, trying not to let the woes of others affect my own precious life. After all, it’s a depressing thought to have to go through: projecting the tragedies of others on your own life. We have enough shit to deal with already, don’t we?

Thinking about the death of our own loved ones is equally uncomfortable. Our natural inclination is to run away, to bury that feeling and hope that by some miracle, we will never have to face that reality. We aim for blissful ignorance. But is that what we ought to do? After all, there will come a time when all of us have to deal with tragedy. Whether that’s a mass murder affecting our community, the chronic sickness of a friend, or the death of a partner, parent or child.

The overwhelming majority of us will one day have to watch a loved one die. As death slowly approaches, we attempt to flee and suppress the thought of a world without the person we hold dear. But just as our legs move in a nightmare slodging like molasses as our killer catches up to us (I know I’m not the only one that has these types of dreams!), the reality of time prevents us from escaping the inevitable. As the years pass, the moment slowly approaches and most of us continue to suppress these thoughts as our anxieties about it increase. We will inevitably arrive in the moment, blindsided by what we saw coming all along, but actively chose not to look at.

If then, there is an inevitability of outcome, why do we actively choose not to prepare?

Treat emotions like skills

We spend hours, days, even years practicing hard skills, preparing for the difficult situations that necessitate the possession of that skill. Most of us don’t spend any time at all, however, practicing for situations that are difficult emotionally. None so little as death and tragedy. Why is it that?

If you take someone who has never golfed before and give them a golf club, put them on a course and ask them to play, it will, of course, be a disaster. They’ve never done it before. Their muscles are not accustomed to the proper body position in relation to the ball, the small nuances of pressure flowing through the fingers along the grip, or the mechanics of the swing. You would never ask someone who knows nothing about golf to compete at the highest level, in say, the Masters Tournament. If you did, it would be a disaster.

Yet, we do little to no active preparation for “the Masters’’ of our emotional lives. For example, the death or severe suffering of loved ones. Can we expect anything except utter misery and dejection when the moment comes?

One might argue that even though we don’t practice actively for tragedy, we all accumulate experiences throughout our lives to a varying degree that help us prepare ourselves passively, by necessity. We hear about death all the time, after all.

For example, I heard a story a few weeks ago of a fatal two car accident in Las Vegas where all nine people in both cars were killed, seven in one car were all part of one family, and survived by the mother of the children aboard. Fatal car accidents are always tragic, but to think about the pain of a mother who loses all her children overnight is nauseating. Are not these instances, while passive and relatively distant, still sufficient to help us practice for the big day?

This seems to me to be insufficient yet, first because the volume of these mini-tragedies we are exposed to (i.e “practice rounds”) is just too small for most (though not all) of us. The second and more important (in my opinion) reason passive preparation will not suffice is due to the fact it’s not experienced and practiced intentionally. We read about the mother in the above story who loses all her children in one day, we think “that’s horrible” and then we move on, and block the emotions from our minds. “It won’t happen to me”.

Let’s apply this to the golf analogy. Maybe you suck at golf, and you really don’t like to golf, but you find out that your new boss at work LOVES golf and he plans to drag you on the course in July for a client outing.

Since you don’t really enjoy playing and you are not forced to play too much, you just grumble and plan to deal with it later. Your boss brings it up several times in the months leading up to the event and you continue to bury the thought. “I’ll cross that bridge when I get there”.

Well, July eventually rolls around and the big day is upon you, for which you didn’t mentally or physically prepare at all. You completely and utterly suck. You’re slicing the ball left and right. You whiffed a few times. Everyone is looking at you because you’re taking forever to finish and just slamming Bud Lights to make it through the round. You’re not really improving either because you’re too nervous, mentally exhausted and focused on the negative emotions of the day to really internalize and reflect on your mistakes. The day comes to a close, you shoot 135, the clients are unimpressed, not because of your score itself, but because of your emotional reaction to your score. You’re not only embarrassed, but also hammered.

Okay now rewind. Let’s say instead you decide instead to practice just a little bit, maybe a few times a month. After playing a few practice rounds, you go to the golf range and work on specific aspects of your swing, breaking it down into component parts. You don’t practice every day because you prefer to do other things, but you start to understand the game and after a while, you become comfortable playing. Don’t kid yourself, you still blow chunks, but you are in an exponentially better place than you were.

The big day with your boss comes and once again, you don’t do great. You’re slicing the ball left and right. You whiffed a few times. However, this time your emotional response to each shot is tethered. You’ve been here before. You know how to deal with the frustration that creeps up your spine the second your club makes poor contact with the ball and it goes flying off course. You temper your reaction and get back on track mentally for the next shot. You only have two Bud Lights instead of ten, shoot 110 and finish the round mentally on top, exuding emotional fortitude to your boss and clients.

This is sort of how we pass through our lives if we neglect to face inevitable tragedies. We bury the bad feeling our whole lives, running away from the negative emotions of despondency. We hope it will never catch up to us, but we know deep down, it will.

What if we instead ran toward those painful emotions, using them as a way to grow in character as human beings? What if instead of choosing to ignore the painful feelings elicited by tragedy, we faced them head on and prepared for the harsh and beautiful reality that is life (and death)?

Just as one breaks down the golf swing on the range, what if we started to dig deep to uncover and break down the nuances of the pain we feel exploring our emotions induced by thinking about the death of a loved one? Anger, fear, confusion, sorrow.

What if we sat with, and meditated on, what the mother who lost all her children must be feeling?

What if we started practicing our negative emotions?

Don’t take my word for it

There is corroborated wisdom in running toward the things that you fear.

Shamans and guides who help hold space for journeyers during psilocybin trips know this well. The journeyers are warned that during their experience, they might face sudden death, or long-hidden demons, still yet uncovered hiding in the shadows of the mind. These journeyers are encouraged not to shy away, but rather to run towards their demons. They are told to accept death in all its horror. To let go of control. Only then will a world of freedom, joy and appreciation become available to them.

To quote the psychologist and author, Jordan Peterson, “The world is full of hidden dangers and obstacles — and opportunities. Leaving everything hidden in the fog because you are afraid of the danger you may find there will be of little help when fate forces you to run headlong toward what you have refused to see … With careful searching, with careful attention, you might tip the balance toward opportunity and against obstacles sufficiently so that life is clearly worth living despite its fragility and suffering … But there will be times in your life when it will take everything you have to face what is in front of you, instead of hiding away from a truth so terrible that the only thing worse is the falsehood you long to replace it with”ˆ1

There’s plenty of science as well to show that practicing thoughts and emotions over time can change our brain composition. It’s kind of mind-blowing actually, that we are able to condition our brains to adapt and change in response to specific stimuli (neuroplasticity). I love the example of the Moken tribe which can see underwater about twice as well as average due to a physical adaptation that those people have learned based on repeated practice (study).

Similarly, we can train our brain to prepare for situations that have not happened. It’s actually a uniquely human characteristic, to be able to project a reality that has not yet happenedˆ2. A teenager might imagine becoming a famous soccer player in ten years and owning a mansion or having a spouse and raising a family together. This projected situation does not exist in what we call reality today, it only exists in a potential reality: inside the mind of the individual creating (manifesting) it.

Why would we not then take advantage of these two mind-blowing abilities and change our proclivity to specific emotional elicitations in response to future negative stimuli?

Practice Makes Perfect

My challenge to myself and to you is to start to practice emotions, particularly difficult ones. Think often about pain, death and tragedy, especially those of the people you love. Invite it into your life. Become familiar with it. Not so much your own death or tragedy (though there are many reasons to do this as well that are beyond the scope of this article), but the deaths of your loved ones: a pet, parent, wife, husband, girlfriend, boyfriend … your child. Yes, come to terms with the fact that you might have to bury your child. It’s an extremely depressing thought but facing this potential reality will, as far as I can see, have at least three concrete benefits:

Benefit 1: In the short run, this puts things in perspective and creates a deep appreciation for our loved ones. A constant awareness of the fragility of life helps us gloss over the bullshit and realize that the little things don’t really matter. A snide comment that a sibling or spouse made about you in front of everyone is actually not a huge of a deal. A coworker taking credit for hard-worked hours you alone put in on a project can be frustrating, but in the grand scheme of things, does it matter?

Benefit 2: It will help clarify to those about whom you truly care. If you really want to know which relationships you cherish, think about each person’s death. Which one hurts the most? Who will you miss? What interactions with these people, whether it be over text facetime or in person, do you take for granted that are actually a cornerstone of your life?

Benefit 3: Over the long run, this practice of inviting death into your life will build emotional strength. It will allow you to endure small setbacks more easily, grow your ability to handle tough situations at work, in the family, and in day-to-day life. When the time comes that you have to face the music and experience the death or other tragic happening of a loved one, you’ll have been there before, you’ll be able to tether your emotional response (just like your crappy round of golf with your boss) and you’ll be content in the fact that you squeezed everything you could have out of that precious relationship.

Testing

How do you do this? Start by doing the below exercise once a week. You might have done something similar before, but bear with me.

Imagine a family member or close friend about whom you care deeply. Pick a specific person. Take a second and bring this person into your mind. Imagine the person’s face in detail: eyes, nose, mouth, wrinkles (or lack thereof). Think about the way they walk, the way they talk, and the way they chew; think about the person's quirks. When was the last time you talked to this person? What did you talk about?

Flash forward one week: You’re on the phone with a different close friend or family member, coordinating this person’s funeral, discussing the time of the wake.

You are on your laptop, booking your travel to get home or to wherever this person’s life will be celebrated, one final time.

You are putting together a slideshow of pictures with him or her. Your first photo together. Each of their birthdays you celebrated … Your last photo together.

You arrive at the funeral and all your friends and family are there, you are temporarily distracted by the chaos of everyone being together, but deep down there is an underpinning of sorrow and despair just waiting to creep up.

You go through the funeral, holding back tears to show strength for your loved ones. But as the casket is closed for the last time and lowered into the final burial place, you can’t help but shed a few, knowing that you’ll never again be able to look at the physical body of the person you love so much.

The day is coming to an end and the chaos of the funeral has settled down. You are lying in bed thinking about all the wonderful people you saw today, but you suddenly feel empty. The house feels empty, the world feels empty. *You* feel empty.

You wake up the next day, that person is physically gone. You’ll never be able to speak with, see, touch or laugh with that person again. Not in this life.

Now, bring yourself back to here and now. Take a few moments to sit in the solace that you have more time with this person together. Relish the fact that this person still lives. You can spend more time with him or her, quality time of your making.

Maybe this day will never come. Perhaps you croak before the person that you imagined in the above exercise and you never have to live that day in reality. But rest assured you WILL have to live that day for someone you do care about.

Conclusion

Earlier I presented three concrete reasons for practicing negative emotions. 1) Build appreciation and put things into perspective 2) Clarify the people we truly cherish and 3) build emotional resilience. I’d like to also offer a fourth.

After many repetitions performing a certain motion (physical or mental), we build neurological connections so strong that the motion seems like second nature. This allows us to look BEYOND the motion itself into what’s next for us. Once you take enough golf swings, you stop thinking about every single move individually — your brain unconsciously repeats previously rehearsed patterns. After tragedy strikes, life goes on. The world keeps spinning and you still have a life to live.

Benefit 4: Practicing negative emotions allows us to modulate our response to them reactively, but it also allows us to see a world beyond the tragedy. It gives us a viewport into a new world. A world where we are stronger, more stable, and more emotionally sound human beings. It allows us to move towards unconscious competence in modulating emotional responses.

Flash back to my friend and his father. Despite the grief that his father’s chronic disease brings, my friend and his father hopefully still have many years left. They will be closer as a family because of it. They will cherish every moment they have together more. They will start to notice the nuances of life and relationships that we so easily gloss over when we take each other for granted. They will be more connected. And when the time comes for them to part ways, they will look back knowing they cultivated their relationships to the fullest.

To me, building connections is one of the core reasons we as humans exist. To Love. We sort of take life for granted. We take the people in our lives for granted. We treat them like they should live for us; like they are part of our world.

In reality, the fact that we exist in our current form at all is mind blowing. To have people that we care about and can consciously experience life with is nothing short of a miracle.

Practicing for tragedy does not just prepare us for the day it inevitably comes, it also opens our eyes to the miracle of sentient and self conscious life, helps us squeeze the most out of our relationships, and our lives to the fullest potential.

Lean into negative emotions. Run towards that which you fear. Face the world’s difficulties head on, and open the doors to a world of appreciation, contentment, freedom and strength yet undiscovered.

Bruce Lee said, “Do not pray for an easy life; pray for the strength to endure a difficult one.”

I offer you the challenge to not just pray for the strength to endure a difficult life. Create it yourself.

1. Jordan Peterson,12 More Rules for Life (New York, New York: Penguin, 2021) 107, 108.
2. Donald, M. (1991). Origins of the modern mind: Three stages in the evolution of culture and cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.