Bad Stuff That Pushes Us Forward

Dis­as­ters and every­day mis­for­tunes have a way of push­ing us for­ward — well — most of us any­way. Some get stuck along the way over some of the small­est road­blocks. The Y2K sit­u­a­tion actu­ally improved the records stor­age sys­tems of thou­sands of com­pa­nies and mil­lions of indi­vid­u­als. Those pre­cau­tions may come in very handy some­day. 9/11 woke us up socially as well as glob­ally. Every major war has spurred the impe­tus for new tech­nolo­gies. A short­age of whale oil brought us the petro­leum age. Europe’s stag­nant econ­omy of the eigh­teenth and nine­teenth cen­turies brought mil­lions of will­ing work­ers to America’s shores. OPEC’s oil embargo of the 1970’s woke Detroit from its nine mile to the gal­lon behe­moth auto­mo­bile slum­ber and brought us more effi­cient (and even safer) cars.
Over the years, I have had some really good sit­u­a­tions go sour. Each time I was pushed out of my com­fort zone and back into life as a jour­ney. I ini­tially resented each col­lapse. After all, does the uni­verse not owe me a com­fort­able ride?
Appar­ently not. I have been care­ful about feath­er­ing my nest — both phys­i­cally and men­tally since my twen­ties. Life is not defined by its com­forts, but by our abil­i­ties to tran­scend our dis­as­ters. Even if you have lived in the same town all of your life, you have still had a string of dif­fi­cul­ties that have pushed you for­ward. For some it has been health prob­lems. For oth­ers it has been eco­nom­ics or the col­lapse of a rela­tion­ship. Life is resis­tant to stag­na­tion. It will bring storms to clean out our emo­tional rub­bish.
The ques­tion is really not, “Why do bad things hap­pen to good peo­ple?” but “Why does good often come from bad?” That is the really intrigu­ing ques­tion! Vol­ca­noes that kill can also push dia­monds to the sur­face. The flood of eco­nomic and polit­i­cal refugees around the world has stim­u­lated the global econ­omy. Why is it the sum of the good in the world is greater than its evil parts?
Some­thing of char­ac­ter is reveal­ing itself. You can sense it in his­tory, biol­ogy, chem­istry, physics, and even in your own prob­lems. It pushes toward the sur­face and has a def­i­nite direc­tion. It is also too big to see all at once. The stuff of life we label as “bad” may only be the shell. Go for­ward with it!