Everything Will Be Okay
A few weeks ago, I had a bad accident that brought me to the emergency room.
I was playing outside with my daughter when in a moment, I lost consciousness and collapsed onto the ground. I woke up not knowing what happened, only to see my daughter next to me while there was blood all over my clothes.
It turns out that I fainted and my head struck concrete (along with a gardening bed and sharp metal mesh), which led to deep cuts, hazy vision, bad bruising, and intense pain across the left side of my face. This is the first time I’ve fainted like this, but I somehow mustered enough composure to call 911, had an ambulance pick me up, and had my daughter be with a next-door neighbor while I went to the hospital (my wife was teaching at the time so she wasn’t home).
When I got to the emergency room, I was immediately taken to get my head scanned due to the nature of my injuries. Fortunately, the CT scan revealed that there was no internal bleeding or facial fractures, which meant that my body would ultimately heal on its own. So even though I looked like a complete wreck, I knew that the medicinal power of time would orchestrate wonders underneath my lacerated skin.
After my wounds were cleaned and a physician stitched up my cheek, I was discharged and my brother took me back home. It was close to 10 PM when I arrived so the streets were silent, but the fervor of my thoughts amplified the volume of everything.
My daughter must have been so scared. Is she going to be all right?
I see a big blurry spot out of my left eye. Is that going to continue?
It looks like it’s been mauled by a rabid animal. Is everything going to heal?
This was a completely unexpected accident. Does that mean it could happen again?
I managed to get a few hours of sleep that night, but woke up the next morning feeling defeated. Each look in the mirror made me feel hopeless, and each pounding headache made me worry about the state of my mind. This pattern of feeling a sensation in the present and extrapolating it to a dark future governed so much of my thoughts.
But one thing about a having young child is that they help you question these patterns when you need it most.
When I saw my daughter the next morning, the first thing she asked was:
She didn’t care about the puss oozing out of my wounds or the fact that my face looked like a massive balloon. All she knew was that I fell the day before, and that I was now back home. Even though I didn’t look like the dad she saw each day, she knew that I was the same dad that she cared so deeply for.
In that moment, I straightened my back and told her, “Appa got hurt pretty badly, and it’s been pretty rough. But it’s going to be okay.”
It’s going to be okay.
When she heard that, she nodded and flashed her innocent smile. And in that moment, I found myself smiling as well.
The Buddha once broke down the distinction between pain and suffering through the analogy of two arrows. When we experience a setback or negative event, we are struck by the first arrow, which is pain. But shortly thereafter, we are then struck by a second arrow, which is our emotional reaction to that pain. This second arrow is where suffering is born, and while we can’t avoid the inevitably of pain, we have more control over whether we want to suffer as a result.
I’ve since realized that this second arrow strikes when we don’t believe that things are going to be okay. In fact, I think almost all suffering comes down to an inability to believe that.
When I first returned home from my accident, the source of my distress wasn’t necessarily the pain itself (even though it was very intense), but more so the questioning of whether everything would be all right. For example, when I kept noticing that the vision from my left eye was blurry, my next thought was, “Is this going to be the state of my eyesight now? If so, how in the world am I going to deal with this?”
Implicit in these questions is the belief in a grim future, and the assumption that helplessness will be your default response. That you won’t know what to do if your fears came true, and that you will spiral into chaos if that were the case.
But this is not how life works.
If you were to think back on all the moments where you thought everything collapsed, how do you explain the fact that you’re still here standing today? Even if you did experience the worst of your worries, what led you here to read this very piece you’re reading right now?
There’s a great irony to thinking that your life is unbearable because your very existence means that you are already bearing it. The very fact that you’re here right now is proof that you have what it takes to endure and overcome your hardships. You are here despite everything, and that alone is sufficient proof of your resilience.
I’ve found that the most practical way to embody this resilience is to assert that things will be okay. Even if the present moment feels distant from that belief, the faster you can internalize this, the quicker you can escape the trough of sorrow that accompanies any negative event.
I like to visualize this dynamic through a movement along this graph:
The moment you experience a significant setback or tragedy, you tend to plummet into a mental space where the future looks incredibly dark. You’re uncertain of your abilities, you picture the worst-case scenario, and you isolate yourself because the world seems like a scary place.
In short, you believe that things won’t be okay, and you have no reason to believe otherwise.
Now, this is a perfectly natural response to any form of shock or trauma, so the goal isn’t to pretend like things will resolve right away. You need time to process these events, and most importantly, to also monitor any progress on your end. Time and rest truly are the greatest forms of medicine, and they’re crucial to giving you the confidence that you’ll be all right.
But the danger here is when you refuse to see any daylight and you continue in this darkened state, regardless of where things are going:
This is where feelings of self-hatred, shame, and depression become prevalent because if you don’t think things will be okay, then you lose your ability to trust yourself. Self-confidence stems from your ability to lean into life instead of shrinking from it, and you have to believe in a future worth living for to feel that sense of conviction in your days.
So even if things don’t feel like they’ll be okay, you have to do the work of convincing yourself of it. Reach out to your loved ones, read books that inspire you, go outside and get some exercise. Anything that helps you dislodge the second arrow of suffering is a worthy pursuit, and interacting with the world is the most reliable way of going about it.
Once you enter the top half of the graph, it’s only inevitable that progress will be made. When you start to believe that everything will be okay, the future becomes an ally of the present. You understand that whatever you’re going through now is a natural part of the healing process, and that there’s a state you’re actively working toward. Purpose becomes a part of the picture here, and that does wonders for accelerating you to an equanimous baseline.
The truth is that I’ve gone through many health issues over the past few years, some of which have been more distressing than others. Time and time again, I’ve found that so much of the healing process is about how quickly I can understand that things will be okay. Even though some of these issues have persisted to this day, what’s been true is that I’ve been able to handle each of them. At first, I didn’t know if I could, but given enough time and resilience, I’ve found that to be true.
Ultimately, I’ve found that the ideal graph looks something like this:
You get shaken up by the event, question everything for a brief moment, then quickly find a way to tell yourself that it’ll be okay. I call it an “ideal” because it’s just that, an ideal. It’s not easy for me to follow either, but seeing it visually laid out like that helps to serve as an aspiration. And given that I’ve been able to endure everything that’s come at me so far (just like you have), perhaps the wisest thing to do is to accept that strength sooner than later whenever the next challenge arises.
Because the truth is that one day, we will all experience the most challenging day of our lives.
In When Breath Becomes Air, Paul Kalanithi details his harrowing yet heartening account of living with terminal cancer. What I learned reading this memoir is that even when you know that death is near, you can still believe that everything will be all right and live the final years of your life accordingly.
After Paul’s final words in the manuscript, the book concludes with a beautiful epilogue written by his wife, Lucy. She discussed how determined and focused Paul was to write his book while he still could, and lived his final years with a sense of purpose and meaning that made her fall in love with him all over again.
As she writes in the epilogue:
Paul’s decision to look death in the eye was a testament not just to who he was in the final hours of his life but who he had always been. For much of his life, Paul wondered about death – and whether he could face it with integrity. In the end, the answer was yes.
I think we all have that superpower that Paul had. In fact, it’s a central part of the human condition. We are all capable of bearing the unbearable, as our very existence ensures that we do so.
And that is how I know that everything will be okay.
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