don's report archive

Wellness in the Headlines
(Don's Report to the World)

Dealing with Adversity
Thursday October 26, 2000

No matter how much energy you invest in crafting a wellness lifestyle, there will be times when you have to deal with adversity, setbacks or challenges to your chosen ways of life. During such times, you will be tested -- tested in the sense of having to deal with change. The test will be simple. It will consist of an opportunity to adapt well to the challenges before you, or suffer a diminution in the quality of your life. It’s basically pass or fail. As a lifestyle artist or seeker of a wellness lifestyle, you can pass, not just one test but all such tests that lie ahead as the years come and go before you die.

The challenges of change requiring skillful self-managing adaptations may be temporary, such as a cold, or permanent, such as a spinal cord injury. While we cannot know the nature of future challenges, they are as certain as sunrises and sunsets and, knowing that, we can resolve in advance to always deal with life as it is and not as we wish it were.

What works and what does not work depends in good measure on the nature of the challenges to which you must adapt as well as your circumstances and personal resources.

One of my favorite writers, Robert Benchley (father of the author of Jaws), wrote many a memorable phrase, and two of them come to mind when contemplating a self-management perspective on adaptations to change. The first was a reference to inevitability and accidents: "My only solution for the problem of habitual accidents ...is to stay in bed all day. Even then there is always the chance that you will fall out." So it is with changes in life: They can be minimized but, ultimately, life is filled with risks -- we must not be overly cautious to the point that we live fearfully or limit our explorations and adventures.

The second favorite Benchley line, one that applies in many situations but especially in this one, is this: “The world is divided into two kinds of people: Those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who do not.”

From a self-management for lifestyle artistry point of view, there are two broad categories of change. To borrow from the wisdom of Benchley, let me divide change into two kinds: 1) welcome changes; and 2) unwelcome changes. The former are easy to manage; this report will assume that the real challenges requiring skillful adaptations come with the unwelcome, unexpected and unpleasant changes.

At this point, a definition of change seems in order. According to Webster, change is “to become different, to pass from one phase to another, to undergo transformation and transition.” It continues but that’s the basic idea.

A self-management mindset about change can help you navigate these phases. It can help you transform and transition with the least amount of stress and delay. It can help you regain your position on the right side of the worseness/ wellness continuum. Your goal should be to quickly recognize and come to terms with changes and then adapt to them, rather than resist and experience frustration or despair for a prolonged period of time. The French have an expression (I’ll spare you the French language version) to the effect that the more things change, the more they stay the same. The French are full of cow-poo -- very little stays the same.

Change is not fun, especially at first when it seems quite likely that things have almost surely gone from bad to worse, or from pretty good to not so good at all which, unfortunately, is often true, but, that’s the nature of life. The larger point to keep in mind is that a self-managing mindset will improve your chances for brighter outcomes down the road.

If your first response to change usually is something like, “Hell no, I won’t go,” not to worry provided this is just the initial reaction and you get over it, expeditiously.

Challenges might only require modest changes in your routine or, as often occurs, change can impose dramatic factors that affect your expectations, your daily routine, your lifestyle and nearly everything else about your life.

Tomorrow I’ll offer some specific guideline principles to help you deal with change like a lifestyle artist.

(Ed. Note: Views expressed in this and other columns are those of the author and not necessarily those of the SeekWellness Editorial Board.)

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