“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”

Viktor Frankl

As much as life is about striving beyond what is, moving towards greater and better things, life is nonetheless about making do with situations we find ourselves in. Cards are given to all of us. Some reasonable. Some lavish. Some brutally unfair. But we can only ever be where we are.

That’s how life is. A spectrum of chance upon which we can apply ourselves. To be a nerd and quote from Star Trek:

“It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not weakness, that is life.” ―Jean-Luc Picard

No matter what we do, no matter how good we are, the time will come when the hammer falls and we’re faced with circumstances we feel we don’t deserve.

What do we do about that?

Nature held a lesson for me.

I was walking down a trail in Dublin when I came across an old oak that had been butchered, its grand heights reduced to an armless stump looming ten feet high. Surrounded by other trees, you might think it decrepit by comparison. Yet it was anything but.

Looming against the blue sky and cotton wisps of cloud, the oak was robed in ivy, and little flowers speckled it like jewels of the finest worth. Insects buzzed around it, the oak’s seeming deadness their world of life. Little birds, European robins, dashed about, some landing in its ivy, others at its summit, their song finer than any music.

It was beautiful. Even in its ruin, it made me stop and stare.

I wondered. If this tree could think, would it consider this fate a loss? There is a silent wisdom to trees. They never grow half as tall as they can, and even when broken, they do their best with their brokenness. Life handed this tree some cruel cards, yet it faced them with dignity. Even in defeat, it had not really lost, but rather had transformed.

Nature makes good, even on the bad. It never gives up.

What about us?

Standing beneath that tree and its fate, I wondered about the life I had been given, and the life I have crafted out of my deeds or lack thereof for better and for worse. How does one live? Everyone has a shadow. Always there, fleeting like morning mist, gone when you shine sunlight on it but sure to return when the night falls. And night will fall. Life is not all sunshine and rainbows. Darkness must exist for light to exist. The shadow is this: all of our mistakes, all of our bad habits, all of our fears, all of our pain, and everything else in us that would hold us back from meaning and happiness.

That tree had lost almost everything and yet had still become something wondrous and meaningful.

We can do that, too. Especially when life throws a curveball at us. When we fail, our response to failure is often more important than why we failed in the first place — especially when that failure is through no fault of our own. I have met many people suffering from terminal disease. Many had lived healthy, responsible lives only to be blindsided by the diagnoses. How unfair is that? Their attitudes varied, but those who always stood out to me the most were those who accepted what was happening and strived to make good on it in whatever way they could.

That takes courage.

Life is hard and death will find all of us. Yet is that so bad? Mortality itself gives life meaning. Would we prize the seasons as we do if they lasted forever? What is fleeting is necessarily precious. What matters is how we handle our existence, including our own failures. The bottom line: this is your life, you are accountable, what are you going to do about that?

Nature could have left that tree rotten and bleak. Instead it became a monument to its existence, its beauty in life transitioning to beauty of a different kind.

So can we, even as we navigate the painful trials of living.

Make beauty out of ruin.

Joys out of sorrows.

Meaning out of loss.

Purpose out of destruction.

The antidote to our shadows, to all these fears and worries, is to get on with living. To find purpose and meaning in the process that began at your birth and will continue until the day you draw your final breath. The process of growing up, growing onwards, learning to live with yourself, with others, with all the imperfections and troubles, yet also with all the beauty.

Whatever happens next, we must face it with courage and grace.

Everything can be taken from us but that choice. Just as Viktor Frankl found during his time in the Nazi concentration camps, human beings have the irrevocable power to choose how they face the unfair cards of life — indeed, the power to make something out of whatever comes, even if it is death itself.

“The one thing you can’t take away from me is the way I choose to respond to what you do to me. The last of one’s freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstance.” ―Viktor E. Frankl

So, whatever you face, choose how you face it. The good times and the bad are colored by our response to them. As Milton wrote in Paradise Lost, the mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven out of hell or a hell of out heaven.

How we handle life is just as important as how life handles us.

Nature makes good on things the best it can. So can we.

We all drink from the fountain of life, and its bitterness is as strong as its sweetness, yet it nourishes our souls with both. Let the pain teach you. Let the losses humble you. Let your own fallibility open your heart to empathy for others. That’s what we’re all doing. Walking down the unpredictable trail of life, doing what we can with what it brings. So make good on it, and make good in the lives of those around you.

Nothing can take that choice away from you.