When Everything Goes Wrong

Have you ever had one of those days when everything goes wrong? How about a week!?
I had one of those weeks. It is not necessary, or even helpful, to go into all the details of how my plans seemed to crash and burn last week, but, needless to say, I was not fully prepared to lead the online portion of practice last week.

So, when we have one of those days “where everything goes wrong” what can we do? Oftentimes, all we can do is look back at the experience when it is all over and wonder how it all got so crazy and messed up. Sometimes we obsess over what we could have done differently to prevent that suffering. Or, we worry about when this will happen again in the future and feel upset now because we know we won’t be able to handle that stress again.

Well, fortunately, we are all practitioners of meditation. We are more mindful now than we were in the past. And that changes things. When we look back at the experience of “everything going wrong,” we see that not “everything” did go wrong. That is just an example of how the language we use can increase the suffering we experience. It must be worse when “everything goes wrong” than when only a few things go wrong, right?

In fact, when I look back on that week and carefully examine my experience, there was a lot of difficulty for me during the beginning half of the week. However, there were many people who were helping me straighten out the problems and, by the end of the week, most of the critical issues had been resolved and my life was mostly back to normal. So how bad was it really?

When I go even deeper into the examination of my experience, I realize that, as bad as things were, I was not really that worried or even that stressed out. I was aware of the intensity of my experience as it was happening, and I was able to take several moments during those days of ‘crisis’ to relax into my body, releasing tension, and even smiling a bit. I knew that I was doing everything in my power to resolve the situations that arose and I was getting the help I needed from others in many areas.

So, I was, in fact, despite the multiple crises arising, working more from a sense of acceptance and equanimity, knowing that however the problems played out, they would resolve in a way that I could accept.

As it turns out, the results were mostly positive outcomes (except for the confusion and lack of focus I brought to our group meeting at the church). Once we actually started practice, I was able to settle into the experience without distraction. I hope that came through to those who were present.

I am going to leave you with three quotes from the amazing Mr. Fred Rogers. For the younger members of the group, who may not have an intimate connection with him, you can go to Google or YouTube to see loving-kindness embodied. Here are his words about stress and “hard times”:

In times of stress, the best thing we can do for each other is to listen with our ears and our hearts and to be assured that our questions are just as important as our answers.

The media shows the tiniest percentage of what people do. There are millions and millions of people doing wonderful things all over the world, and they’re generally not the ones being touted in the news.

When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”

I had many helpers during my week of “everything going wrong” and by focusing on the helpers rather than my distress, I was able to finish out my week with less stress than I would have in the past. I remain grateful for the help I received, even if I didn’t acknowledge it at the time.