“I have the worst luck.”
“How can you believe in God when bad things happen to good people?”
These meditations nor Eudaimonia are explicitely religious, firstly. They work just fine for those of us who believe, but also apply for those who do not believe.
We tend to hold a misperception that God will “put a Band-Aid” on our problems.
The broke down car.
Financial shortcomings.
Heartbreaks.
But, whether or not it’s God or luck or karma or whatever you believe, things seldom work like a Band-Aid.
More often, the world sprinkles the LEGO blocks of solutions into our lives. The challenge is to:
Ensure we are acting consistent to the person we aspire to be
Are managing our perceptions well enough to notice the “blocks”
If we are acting more consistently to who we want to become, you will find that you’re naturally “generating” more solutions — or parts of them — in your daily life.
Going to the gym each day and eating well? Less likely to get sick. And if you do get sick, you’re more likely to fight it off easier.
Managing your finances well and investing (or learning)? Less likely to suffer financial issues, especially into the future.
Nourishing your enriching relationships and tearing out the bad ones, root and stem? More likely to have friends and loved ones who are there for you when you need them most!
But the second part — managing our perceptions — help us to mitigate the negative feelings we may have when we are confronted with those hardships.
It isn’t a broken down car from schmucking a deer at 70mph. It’s a subtle hint that you might drive too fast or distracted.
They aren’t financial shortcomings. They’re invitations to review your finances and refresh them.
Heartbreaks? No, no — they are opportunities to look to yourself. To read, to write, to reflect and to improve oneself.
Good perception control makes the “bad stuff” seem more tolerable and makes those “LEGO blocks” more obvious.
So, in closing — God doesn’t “let” bad things happen to good people. But, instead, scatters the building blocks for us to architect our solutions out of the “bad things.”
There are no bad things in the world — just bad lenses through which we view them!
Follow for daily philosophical meditations.
These are distillations from my coming book “YouDaimonia: the Ancient Philosophy of Human Flourishing.”