In Praise of Crises
Suffering stings bitterly but only in enduring countless stings does the beekeeper reaps
I don't know if I would have materialised to anything close to being a writer (or just someone valuable) had it not been a stream of some minicrises that I reluctantly consented to. While honestly, given a chance, I would look for a rabbit hole to escape from anything that strips me of any defence, these sorts of troubles have and often stretch my imagination to bulletproof myself.
We already have plenty of lessons, from our everyday encounters, to warn ourselves enough in advance when we're vulnerably unprepared; a parent, as an example, rightly says "I want the best for my kids; they shouldn't repeat and endure what I passed through." Another will aptly proclaim " I would detest my children sweat-working a lot in future. " "Ruminating bad things mustn't be their portion"
These innumerable 'parental cuddling advices’ which probably you've heard, are a commonplace. And it's normal as a parent to take parental responsibilities and nest children from the colder truth of trekking on their own. But while parents have a right to care, they have no control over what would befall their beloved children and how they would respond to the unavoidable facts of life.
We wouldn't have known Victor Frankl the Holocaust survivor had he not faced insurmountable starvation, physical abuse, and emotional humiliation. I wouldn't have read the story of Cinde Dolphin who at 40 was diagnosed and survived cancer four times. She couldn't bear with the constant recurrents of overarching body.
Today's behemoths we valiantly admonished were once a far-from-reality personal struggles incubated in the toughest conditions and in unlikely places (often in our spare rooms) and turned into successful breakthroughs. Dozens of stories of every pioneer i have read was bitterly nasty, beginning with contenting with getting to nowhere like someone groping for a door knob in darkness.
The other day, I stumbled on the word Krinein, it's a casual word but carries deep-seated meaning in Greek. It crystallises the absolute moment a physician has to incisively think and settle on the next action to life-support patient wavering on the terminal end. It goes on to say beyond a certain point, when everything else has been tried, is a futile attempt against an irrevocable course of life.
We've all at some point come face-to-face with an all familiar terrain but with a bit of swirling twists, conditions brew up to create the perfect storms. The storms you aren't insulated to cordon off from. And it is easy to feel defeated as the detours we take stray us far away from our goals.
History tells us that past crises have given us the tools we can take refuge in times of unprecedented troubles. In this sense, humanity has had a combination of leverages to respond with new innovations and adaptations that not only made us survive but also thrive in newer resilient ways. Amongst the innovation triggers that Josef Taalbi looked into in 3377 cases, problem-driven catalysts stood out.
Often a crisis gets us off guard, innovation manifests as a response, then the society bulletproofs itself for not only current but future crises. And amid these crises, a few that survives well enough to keep their head above swirling water often ekes out fortunes. I do not mean the usual Silicon Valley riches (though it can be) but just a straightforward template to help individually and then collectively to maneuver minicrises.
Plenty of parents overcuddling their children are unknowingly committing future injustice to them. Giving children a playground to whallow in their own muddly emotions—disapointment, sadness, envy—prepares them to firsthand relate to those difficult moments and experience them head-on. When this first step—resilience—is reached, happiness will take care of itself.
Cinde Dolphin felt the same bubbles of fulfillment after narrowly surviving cancer. The onslaught, pain, bouts of chemotherapies, lumpectomy, radiations she had to endure field-tested her mettle. And today, Cinde Dolphin is the poster child of the Kili Medical Drain Dryer. Besides spending time at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro, she fell in love with the African fabric of product design, and her Kili Dyers is a testimony to that.
But one thing that makes me beam with smile is her generous heart; she extended her hand to Afghan refugees, her cancer-inspired idea rippled out the once sleepy local communities around Kilimanjaro, when patients can't afford her Kili Brain Dryer, she sends them for free.
This is her way of tickling herself on purpose. "I was healed by helping others, and I think others will feel that too," she once laid bare her secret sauce of fulfillment.
The truth is we would be worse than we are without a couple of crises popping up, more conformists, more fragile, and above all the critical spirit, the engine of progress, would not even exist. What we suffer from unearths the insufficiencies of life. In these stormy moments, when we look for what is missing in life, we are saying, with no need to say it, that life as it is does not satisfy our thirsts and that it should be better than it is.
When we rise to crisis as exemplified by Cinde Dolphin, when we seize the moment sent to sink us, when we pool our fragmented efforts and resources, we can steelman ourselves from every ill wind. Suffering stings bitterly but only in enduring countless stings does the beekeeper reaps.
Thank you for always supporting me in my personal crises.
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Great observations, Edwin. We all face crises at sometime. Some of us survive better than others.
Precisely! Crises are exactly what strengthen all of us.
I recently wrote about Newton and the Plague, and how he had to isolate for a few years. That's when we got the universal theory of gravitation and a very good explanation of how light works. Never let a good crisis go to waste!