Living Well With and Without
If your grandmother didn’t use to say, "The world breaks everyone," quoting Hemingway and adding, "and afterwards, many are strong at the broken places,” I think you should be grateful she didn’t.
Many people have been taught — sometimes subtly, sometimes explicitly — that life only starts after the hard parts go away. If you’re feeling anxious, you need to fix it before speaking up. If you’re grieving, you must wait until the sadness is gone before you can begin again. The implicit mental rule is this: you have to avoid feeling bad to feel good, and you need to feel good before you can do good.
Some might fall into that type of thinking because it almost makes sense. We’re used to solving problems. We touch a hot stove; we pull our hand away. We treat illness; we expect recovery. But the world inside our skin plays by different rules.
The human mind is an amazing tool, allowing us to imagine, plan, evaluate, and create. But that same mind also tells us we shouldn’t be feeling what we’re feeling. It whispers: “You have to get rid of this first. You have to feel better before you can move forward.”
In science, this process is given the term “experiential avoidance” and it’s one of the most toxic ways of interacting with the world. The more we begin to organise our lives around not feeling certain things, the more we numb ourselves, and the more our lives shrink.
But there’s also slight tweaking of that same rule: you have to hang on to feeling good or you will feel bad, and you need to feel good before you can do good.
The more we chase “happiness” in a clinging “or else” fashion, the more it flies away! In science, this process is called “experiential attachment.” It’s another form of experiential avoidance, and we are rapidly learning it is just as toxic to our well-being as the first kind.
From self-help books to advertising slogans, we’re told that we should be happy, and that if we feel bad, we must be doing something wrong. So, naturally, we start fighting our pain. We can’t let it assume it’s natural role in carrying information from our past history into relevant present moments. With enough suppression we may even become emotional idiots — no longer even knowing what we feel.
But notice that clinging to feeling good is another form of the same thing! When we desperately try to fix good feelings in place, they too lose all informational value. Addiction to substances is a clear example of that story and there we even call these doses of substances a “fix”. That is not an accident.
But here’s what decades of research, thousands of therapy hours, and the lived experience of countless people show us: the more you try to control your inner world by avoidance AND by needling clinging, the more control it has over you.
Avoiding anxiety often makes it stronger.
Clinging to joy makes it slip away.
The energy spent here could instead be used to live — and yet so many get stuck in an endless loop, trying to get the “right” feelings in place before they can start taking action.
The trick is to live well even when you don’t “feel good”, as you instead learn how to do a good job of feeling. The alternative to struggling with what’s inside is connecting with how what’s inside helps us manage what’s outside and vice versa.
That is what matters.
Emotional terms tell that story — they ALL started on the outside to teach us about our insides to manage our outsides.
Even the very word “happiness!” It came from a Norse word that meant a good “hap” — a chance, a happening, or a happenstance that happened to occur and make you happy! Does that sound like clinging to you? No, it doesn’t! The very origin of the word invites you to learn to let go and get with what’s happening.
To let emotions into their work, we need a greater ability to feel fully, to show up in the present, and do what matters with our whole heart, no matter what thoughts or emotions show up. Said in another way, emotions need to be allowed come and go so that they can orient us to our history and current circumstances. They are more like lights on our dashboard in our car, than they are blue ribbons to be pounded into the nearest wall.
“Acceptance” doesn’t mean tolerance or resignation. It comes from the Latin word that means “to receive, as if to receive a gift”. And what is that gift? Greater wisdom about your own life.
Let feelings be there — not as something to be fixed (either “fixed” meaning repaired or “fixed” meaning held in place), but as something that simply is.
This is willingness. It’s the decision to say “yes, I will” when asked by life, “Will you have me as I am, not as you judge me to be?”
When you stop trying to control how you feel and instead focus on your what is present and how to move toward what you care about, everything changes. You begin to live less from fear and more from purpose. You stop chasing happiness, and you start creating meaning.
You don’t need to feel better to live better.
Anxiety doesn’t have to vanish before you speak in public.
In the same way, happiness does not need to be “fixed in place.” Like a butterfly with a pin stuck through it to keep it on the bulletin board so kills the emotion itself.
Life asks for your participation and your values — the things you truly care about — don’t demand that you wait until you feel ready. They just ask that you begin and show up.
So, if you still avoid or cling, decide to start living. Ask yourself: “With these emotions as they are, what kind of life do I want to build?”