What To Do When Life's Earthquakes Hit

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I sit here in pajamas as my mind goes blank at what to write this week. Do I write something related to the change here in the US this past week? Or something entirely unrelated? Right now, folks are processing — and that takes time.

I think about the periods in my life when I dealt with a transition from the known world to an unknown one, which technically is every morning I wake up. Each morning though, I assume I can make a decent prediction about the day ahead. The sudden jolts—the 180s, the earthquakes — are a mystery that goes smack in the face.

Sometimes tectonic shifts happen in our lives, and our brains won’t place money on any prediction we could come up with — meaning, we’re freaking out at the change in front of us because it’s new, and “new” means sneaky and freaky.

Conversely, “old hat” means we can practically sleep our way through it. We like old hats.

Today there is much thinking about what lies ahead. But I wonder how long it’ll take before the adaptation to this “new” settles in. Adaptation happens whether we’re thrilled or distraught over a life change. Humans are highly adaptable. We adapt to both the positive things in our lives and the negative ones. It’s called hedonic adaptation.

That’s the theory anyway. The criticism of this concept is that when things become negatively irreversible, such as when we suffer a life-altering disability or become diagnosed with a chronic illness, there’s a greater risk we won’t adapt back to an emotional set-point. The same goes for those who think they have no agency or use worry as their constant fallback plan. For these people, a tectonic shift can ratchet life further down.

But no matter who you are, realizing we all have some degree of agency in our lives goes a long way toward making it through unexpected and unfortunate events.

I remember well the mind shift that happened in me when I realized that I, an able-bodied accomplished runner, was the same as a wheelchair-bound racer or a runner with a prosthetic lower extremity. They weren’t pseudo athletes as I’d always thought. They were athletes.

Before this shift in understanding, I would look at these athletes like many people likely do. I’d see them with compassion and empathy because they were disabled. I’d see their efforts as admirable, but I never quite saw them as true athletes because they were limited or different. It wasn’t true running, I’d think.

But then for some reason — I can’t recall why or when — I had the epiphany that these athletes were absolutely the same as me because to compete means to train hard and to approach competition with every ounce of desire and effort you have.

When I watched Simone Biles or any of the athletes at this past Olympics, I had an idea of what it took them to get there. I was never an elite athlete — not even remotely close — but I ran many races over the years (you might think too many), and this qualifies me to understand what makes someone an athlete: training, consistency, and desire.

It was the desire piece that caught my attention when I re-thought my view on disabled athletes. When I see a wheelchair competitor at the start line of a race, I know immediately they’re an athlete. They're devoted to that finish line as much as anyone else in that marathon.

This leads me to wonder whether physically disabled athletes are that much more of an athlete. How much more effort is required of them? How much more conviction for the cause? They aren’t competing as they had before their disabling change. They’re competing with far more determination. Imagine how much knowledge they possess that I don’t.

And isn’t this how it is when we push through a life challenge?

When we get halted by something — disability, disillusionment, disaster — the mind first must grapple with the shock and make basic sense of the new normal. This will take a bit of time, depending on the degree of change in one’s life. But then the mind has a choice of three directions from which to choose. I’ll call them negative, passive, and creative adaptation.

Negative adaptation is a spiraling downward or progressive self-confirmation of hopelessness. Depression and the resulting confirmation bias play a key role in this trajectory — See? I knew this was hopeless. Might as well give up.

I have a relationship with depression, so trust me when I say it’s a demoralizing thug.

Passive adaptation is useful when we don’t have much agency in a situation other than our attitude, which is still a huge deal. This adaptive process is an acceptance of circumstances and adjustment of mindset to the new normal. It’s a prioritization of sanity, inner stasis, and peace. It’s not fighting. It’s equanimity. It’s smart in many ways and can lead to much wisdom.

Creative adaptation is useful when we have a fair amount of agency and an opportunity to turn the situation — ours or others’ — into an improvement on what was. In this instance, as soon as we can feel the creative juices flowing, we get excited about what’s possible. We begin to creatively ponder how our new world — with its new loss, danger, or burden — can be experienced.

“What’s possible?” we ask. This new mindset is fed by a wise excitement because having just gone through a difficulty, we know to be more clearheaded and rational than over-the-top optimistic. This adaptation feels to me like eyes-wide-open curiosity.

This is when we’ll discover the first steps to competing in the wheelchair division at a marathon, starting a weekly group that helps those in hospice, or working to improve local governance. Or in my case, seven years ago, ending a desperately beloved 35-year running career after a trampoline accident and taking up my lifelong ambition to finally write.

These are the gifts that hardship can give. Suddenly, we're no longer hobbled by change, but empowered to do something with far more wisdom than we've ever had.

And, to my mind, that’s so much better than lying on the couch in a pit of hopelessness in unwashed pajamas.

Positive adaptation is when hope and pragmatism have a baby. It creates gifts and opportunities. And most of all, it increases the rate at which pajamas get washed in our world.

Thumbs up to that.