StressLess Body Therapy: Reaction to Change

A few years after my husband’s death, I was at the gym, working out my stress on the cross trainer, and the man next to me asked me how my husband died. I told him that he had a heart attack when he was 41 then a year later we found out he had terminal lung cancer. Yes, he did smoke, but he probably would have been one of the people who ended up with lung cancer even if he never smoked, but maybe he would have lived longer without the cigarettes, or maybe not. Then we started talking about how we never know what is going to happen in life, one day you wake up and plan on going about your day the same as the day before, and you are cleaning house and your husband is outside working in the yard and the next thing you know he isn’t feeling well, 911 is called, and the doctor says “your husband’s heart stopped beating, but we resuscitated him…” Then life is different but you are trying to figure out what happened, and he isn’t getting better. Is it anxiety? Is it fear? Then he goes in for tests and more tests and everything is turning out negative, a biopsy is done and there is no cancer inside his lungs, relief, one more surgery…the doctor says, “it’s malignant.” “ What’s malignant?” “He has cancer on the outside of his lungs.” “Are you sure?” “Yes, I’m sure….” And you are thinking what happened, it’s not supposed to be this way, what do we do now.

What I learned was that the only thing we can count on is that nothing remains the same. Things don’t always work out the way you expect them to. Change is a guarantee. Some changes we initiate and some come without an invitation, but ultimately, we only have control over our reaction to change. We don’t know the reason for anything. We don’t know if something that happens to us is good luck or bad luck. Maybe a bad thing happens so that a good thing can happen. Maybe one event sets up the circumstances for another. I am not saying we should accept the difficult times in life with a smile on our face, with a “don’t worry, be happy” attitude, but we can know that bad times will pass and so will our suffering. We can choose to feel and express our emotions without causing any harm. And we can learn to keep our mind at peace while the chaos of life is happening. After all, the only thing we truly have control over is the mind, which determines our behaviors, our thoughts, our speech, and our actions.

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