One of my favorite LinkedIn presences, Laura Irwin, posted a thought-provoking question there last week: “Where did this entitlement of feeling good all the time come from?” It really resounded with lots of folks, given the sheer volume of commentary that followed. There were many excellent points in the comments, too, but Laura herself made some of the best in her post:

Don’t get me wrong, it would be great if we all did work that made us happy. But still that’s focusing on 3 wrong things.

1. Having to love your work in order to be happy, believing if you hate your job you can’t be happy with anything.
2. Feeling entitled to be happy with everything most of the time in most areas of our lives.
3. Relying on something else in order to be happy.

Inspirational Speakers tell us to nix negative thoughts. Self-help books provide supposed secrets to perpetual positivity. We think we must never feel anything less than awesome.

Because of this we understand less about the world and try to make it all conform to us and how we want to feel.

Those last two sentences are key. Probably very few people, if they really thought about it, truly believe “…we must never feel anything less than awesome.” But if you don’t consciously think about it, there are lots of outside factors (social media and “thought leaders,” for example) that might make you feel and behave as though you believe it anyway. That misguided sense can lead to a lot of grief.

Laura’s point about not understanding the world and trying to make it conform to our wishes is a great one, too. As I said in my comment to her post, I see its fingerprints all over the misguided pursuit of perfection. Whether it’s workplace safety “experts” telling us all accidents are avoidable, or Lean – Six Sigma “gurus” urging us to adopt a zero-loss mindset, it forever means we’re beating ourselves up for realities that are often beyond our control. This, too, leads to grief.

But something was still missing for me – until my family and I re-watched The Princess Bride last Saturday night. The Man in Black, a.k.a. Westley, spelled it out for me: “Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.”

It sounds extreme, and awfully gloomy and disheartening. But aren’t there almost always gloomy and disheartening aspects to our lives? You may be in perfect health and in the best shape of your life – but at the same time you just got dumped by a significant other. Maybe your career is going gangbusters, but you also have a chronically sick child. Perhaps your family life is just about ideal, but you’re also having a religious crisis of faith.

“Into each life some rain must fall*,” despite life-coach weathermen who urge nothing but sunny skies, always, everywhere and forever. And when we can’t reach that utopia, we’re failures, right?

It just ain’t so. We will have some pain, some of us a lot of it.

Here’s another reality, though: some of the worst pain can also be at some of your best times. Star athletes certainly suffer mightily to reach the top of their sports, for example. But it can be true for even schlubs like me.

Some years ago I ruptured a disc in my lower back. Despite drugs and therapy and steroid injections, I wasn’t really getting better after a couple months of savage pain. I had a really good therapist helping me, but I wanted to be more aggressive than she would let me. I called my neurosurgeon (who, God bless him, had recommended against surgery until I’d tried everything else) and asked his opinion of running. He told me that whatever running I chose to do, I wouldn’t make the disc worse, and that it was all up to me as to how much pain I could take.

So I ran. Six miles a session, four days a week. At first, every single step for a mile was shuddering agony, and the pain really didn’t completely ease up until two miles in. Then I could run the rest pretty well.

Each run the pain was a tiny bit less severe, and lasted a bit less long.

One sunny day, after weeks and weeks of this suffering, I got back to the house, and suddenly realized that on that run I had had not one bit of pain.

All that excruciating agony had become one of my greatest triumphs.

 

*I remembered this partial quote as I was writing, but I had no idea where it came from. A bit of research showed me that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s whole poem is awfully fitting here.

The Rainy Day

The day is cold, and dark, and dreary;
It rains, and the wind is never weary;
The vine still clings to the mouldering wall,
But at every gust the dead leaves fall,
And the day is dark and dreary.

My life is cold, and dark, and dreary;
It rains, and the wind is never weary;
My thoughts still cling to the mouldering Past,
But the hopes of youth fall thick in the blast,
And the days are dark and dreary.

Be still, sad heart! and cease repining;
Behind the clouds is the sun still shining;
Thy fate is the common fate of all,
Into each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary.