My habit in the mornings is to spend time reading my bible and some additional devotionals, meditating and praying. And usually practicing Italian and French, although I’m currently in a slacker season on that particular item. One of the additional texts I like to reflect on is The Way to Love; The Last Meditations of Anthony de Mello. A week ago, I underlined the following:
Happy events make life delightful but they do not lead to self-discovery and growth and freedom. That privilege is reserved to the things and persons and situations that cause us pain.
Those backpackers among you know this well. We all love a trip where we had great weather, the nights weren’t too cold, the trail was smooth and clear, the company was pleasant. But it’s on the trips where things didn’t go well where the real learning occurs. We learn that our rain jacket isn’t as waterproof as we thought, or that experimental dinner wasn’t as tasty as we anticipated, or that we can survive a 10-degree night, when forced to, in a 20-degree sleeping bag. We get to apply our learnings to future trips, and dealing with adversity and meeting the challenge builds our confidence while it builds our skills.
Similarly when not backpacking, we all love the happy events, where things went well, where there was fun and it was easy. And as we enter into the holiday season, for most of us there will likely (hopefully) be many of those happy times. There will likely also be some pain; people we don’t like to be around, consequences of previous decisions, memories of people we’ve lost who used to be at the holiday celebrations, maybe a Jello dessert we really don’t care for.
When I was still working, it was around this time of year when a woman engineer who reported to me came into my office and closed the door. She was a very bright engineer, had grown up very poor in another country (dirt floors, wash at a village faucet, breakfast was a fish that her dad caught… that kind of poor). She put herself through college by going hungry and sneaking onto busses because she couldn’t afford the fare.
She sat down and started unloading her frustration. She explained that my predecessor had always respected her opinion and sought out her thoughts, and had always backed her up in meetings with developers. She felt that she was not getting proper respect from some customers, and that I was contributing because I wasn’t showing her proper respect and giving her opinions adequate weight. As the words rushed and tumbled out, she started to cry. She felt bad, and the crying made me very uncomfortable.
What made me more uncomfortable was that she was right. I was not being a good manager, especially to her. It certainly didn’t feel good to be compared to the guy I had replaced and told how much better he had been. It didn’t feel good to have a crying woman in my (glass-faced) office telling me where I was falling short. But it was a growth moment for me. I told her how much I appreciated her coming into my office, because I knew how hard that must have been, and to tell me truth I needed to hear.
I’m no expert, there is probably some suffering that is NOT going to give you growth and you just need to get out of it. But when things are going great, we are not growing as people. So even though we don’t go looking for pain, there’s value in challenging ourselves, and deliberately facing some adversity. It could be physical adversity, it could be emotional adversity. We need the challenge to grow. And if we’re challenging ourselves, there’s going to be some failures along the way, and there will be some pain. When it comes, look for the learning, and lean into the growth.
