“Needs are imposed by nature. Wants are sold by society.”
The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and
tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the Master calls the
butterfly. -Richard Bach.
I was paramedic. I witnessed
tragic accidents. Some accidents were a
result of pure nature – a slick roadway caused by sudden rain, an icy road,
lightning strikes a tree and sets it on fire – it catches the house on fire. It
was probably my career in EMS that made me realize bad things happening is simply
a part of life – and the faster you can accept that reality, the happier you
will be.
As a paramedic, I witnessed
children die too soon – due to careless accidents, due to defects they were
born with, due to being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Death – one of our basic
fears…and one of the fears used most by exploiters to manipulate, to give us a
false sense of security.
While we are born with the
ability to think and reason –we were not born with a guarantee of health,
housing, and food nor even safety. We
were, however, given the ability to protect ourselves as best we can. And when
all else fails, it is our dignity and attitude toward things we can’t change
that make us silently brave.
My father died at age 50 after
a two year battle with ALS.
“It’s not fair!” I remember
crying often. And then my dad’s voice would always come back and remind me,
“Life isn’t fair.”
And finally, one day, I
accepted that statement. And it was with my eyes wide open and actually seeing
the world as it is; that nature is nature; shitty things will happen. Good
things will happen. Be grateful for the good and accepting of the bad and move
on.
As Bull Durham stated in the
movie about baseball (and love): “Sometimes You Win. Sometimes You Lose.
Sometimes it Rains.”
Everything you need to know
about life is found in nature. There will be warm, sunny days. There will be
days of cold and darkness. And that is the beauty of life. Our constant
striving to meet the obstacles of life with strength, dignity, and grace is
what gives our lives significance – it’s what makes us feel accomplished. To embrace
the good that happens to us with a certain humbleness and to accept the bad
with as much poise as we can.
All nature (all life) is both a
burden and a blessing; not either-or, but this-and-that. For example: the same
snowfall you think is beautiful and blankets the ground with needed moisture to
provide food for plants – is also the same snow that caused a slick road and an
accident that cost an eighteen year old girl her life.
That hurricane that wiped out a
small coastal town, also provided jobs for builders, better homes than what
came before, and the opportunity for a community to lean on each other and
display the compassion of man.
It’s in our nature, our
instinct to be optimistic, to believe anything is possible, if we didn’t – we
wouldn’t have innovations. If our brains were hardwired to be negative, we
wouldn’t take risk. We wouldn’t have electricity, planes, trains, automobiles,
computers, or more importantly, pizza, glitter eyeliner, and bacon.
“Nature has never read the Declaration of Independence. It continues to
make us unequal.”-Will Durant
We could learn so much from our
military vets from the earliest wars – who came home battered and bruised but
did not talk about it. Instead, they got back to life, to living, happy to be
home. They did their duty to fight for freedom and were proud to do it.
Men, by nature – are meant to
be…men!
Hunters. Heroes. Strong.
Sturdy. And our world today is creating
a culture of cowards – shaming men who fight for our freedom, condoning police,
hunters.
Behavioral doctors, professors, politicians, and opinion scientists,
have taken the manliness out of men. Raising them to be delicate teddy bears
lacking the power to act, lacking courage, lacking strength — all that nature
has gifted within him.
But men still seeks those
things…only now instead of playing Army Men or Cop and Robbers (not politically
correct) he is using the computer and playing video games. He finds something
that seldom exists in the real world any longer; a community to belong to,
camaraderie, great heroic deeds, realistic chivalry, and true love. In fact,
video games are, for many, the last possibility to somehow perform heroic
deeds, experience epic battles, achieve victory in combat, and overcome defeat.
All of that is available simply by
walking out the door, by taking chances in life. But fear prophets’ and
exploiters try to convince us ‘real’ life should not have risk. Stay home and
play games in the comfort of your house. It’s a miserable exchange from the
real thing, which is why so many people who substitute fake worlds for real
worlds are so unhappy.
Human nature is instinctual –
most women are better at nurturing and other skills than men, and most men are
better at protecting along with other skills. It doesn’t mean that we aren’t
all capable of being nurturing or protecting, but recognizing and respecting
our differences was one of the ideas America was built on. We were meant to complement
each other, not be identical replicas of each other!
“Man is a product of nature, a part of the
Universe. The Universe is operated under exact natural laws. Man is a product
of millions of years of evolution. He adapts himself to the laws of nature or
he perishes.” ― James Hervey Johnson
One of the most stunning books
I’ve ever read was Mans Search for Meaning by Vicktor Frankl. Mr. Frankl was an
Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist as well as a Holocaust survivor. In his
book, Frankl talks about how our body, by nature, is built to endure. Prisoners
in Nazi camps did not brush their teeth, they did not receive medicine or
surgery, yet many of their bodies healed. He was amazed when he was released
from camp that all his teeth remained.
Our bodies are much stronger
and built to endure much more than we realize. And as Frankl pointed out, much
of what sustained the prisoners was curiosity and optimism.
Part of the beauty of life is letting go of the idea of
perfectionism – accepting that life is like nature; full of storms as well as
beautiful days. That happiness in life
comes from overcoming obstacles that stand in our way…happiness comes from
getting things done – even the simplest of things gives us pleasure - we have
accomplished something! It adds to our feeling of independence and confidence.
When I was a paramedic, one of the things I noticed was that people who had
really messy houses were often the unhappiest patients; the patients that had
overdosed on drugs, the patients that had to be taken to the ER because they’d
been involved in a domestic fight or were intoxicated or chronic complainers.
“If an American is to amount to
anything he must rely upon himself, and not upon the State; he must take pride
in his own work, instead of sitting idle to envy the luck of others. He must
face life with resolute courage, win victory if he can, and accept defeat if he
must, without seeking to place on his fellow man a responsibility which is not
theirs.” Theodore Roosevelt
