What to do in the face of extreme adversity and other 34th Birthday Reflections
Picture: our growing family amidst the backdrop of beautiful Colorado mountains, taken exactly on my 34th birthday this year
I’m 34 now! Or as my daughter Norah wrote in her birthday card to me this year, another “365 trip around the sun”, which I’m still unsure where she learned the expression from 🤷🏻♀️ (not complaining though!)
Notice how she’s holding me
I’ve been waiting until I get better from being super sick with this pregnancy to sit down and write my few thoughts on turning yet a year older, but that day still hasn’t come yet unfortunately. So here I am, hot as a literal furnace, trying my best to turn my 2 hours of energy I still do have during any given day into a hopefully insightful annual birthday reflection. You can read past editions here.
On expectations
Expectations are not inherently good or bad. They are what we naturally do in life, to deal with unpredictability/uncertainty and to plan for the future. But I dare say the majority of emotional turmoil comes from expectations that are unmet.
I’ll give you an example. For my birthday this year, I expect David to organize it because: 1. he said he would 😂 and 2. it coincides with when we can throw a little gender reveal party for baby. So you can imagine my disappointment when Thursday came (2 days before the actual party) and David and I still had no idea if we have anything activities planned and anyone was gonna come. The party turned out great later on, and people did show up, but I did give David a hard time that Thursday when I found out that I’d need to simply coplan it with him for everything to go well. In David’s defense (and own words), he did spend hours pondering on a self-made invitation sent to everyone that somehow he thought I didn’t like! His expectation was probably that I would plan everything with him, because it’s both a birthday party AND baby’s gender reveal, the latter of which I have a lot of specific ideas about.
Now, think about all the times in your life you have ever felt disappointed, unhappy, defeated, or unfulfilled. My guess is they are all variations of the mismatch between how you thought things would turn out and how things actually turned out.
So I have a radical proposal for us all. What if, we go into any and all situations with ZERO expectation? AND, what if, you simply ask for it, when you want something very specific to happen your way? Easier said than done, I understand. But I think this simple mindset switch would eliminate so much of our future sufferings. Radical acceptance, I think it is what it’s called. Life is beautiful, not because everything we ever hope for and wish happen will always 100% happen the way we imagine it happen. It is beautiful for the exact opposite reason. Sometimes, things don’t happen the way we plan which disappoints and saddens us. But then, some other times, things happen without us ever planning and later on realizing how desperately we actually needed it. That’s the stuff that makes your heart sing.
That same Saturday, multiple of my friends got stuck in traffic on the way to the party. We invited people from as far away as Denver (2 hours East of us) and Eagle (30 minutes West) and somehow, there were traffic accidents on both sides. My friends from Eagle (who have 3 kids!) spent 3 hours on what should have been a 30 minute drive. My friends from Denver also got stuck in traffic and missed the balloon popping (which revealed if baby is boy or girl). My other friends from Denver thought the party was the very next day. I did not expect them to show up after all of that information. And yet they showed up anyway. We got to spend quality time with Norah’s BFF and my friends from Eagle. My friends from Denver stayed over for hours after the party and we all got to create quality art together (a drawing Norah & her BFF created even made it to the wall in their house!) My other friends from Denver came over the next day with their daughter and they even baked me an absolutely delicious chocolate German buttercream cake 🥹, my first every homemade birthday cake!!!! I ended the birthday weekend on such a high note. Feeling grateful, loved, my emotional tank fulfilled. That is the power of going into a situation without expectations.
When faced with extreme adversity
Everybody is fighting some kind of battle. Talking about expectations 😅, I hope that if you are a person reading my post, you already learned life’s biggest lesson, which is that, it’s always gonna be a struggle, and never a cakewalk. As soon as you think one hurdle is over, the next one would sneak in your way.
Now I’ll spare you with the details of our extreme adversity, because it’s pointless to turn misery into a competitive sports, not to mention impossible. What I want to talk about here is what to do in the face of extreme adversity, however you define it in your head.
When you go through any challenges in life, you can either think like a warrior or think like a victim. It’s this little trick that makes all the difference.
A warrior accepts the challenge & takes actions. A victim moans and groans and asks: why?
This is not to glorify ignorance or toxic positivity. No, you are facing a tough challenge, no doubt. There’s nothing pretty about it. You might even think it’s super unfair. It might knock the wind out of you, render you paralyzed.
But the circular logic of a victim mindset would put you in danger of never escaping the misery loop. You strip yourself of any and all agency you might have had. The blame is on the circumstances, the enemy, the injustice of it all. And worst, when the universe sends you some sort of signal to get out of said challenges, you stick with the misery loop, because even though it stinks, it feels familiar, and somehow, safe.
A warrior realizes there’s nothing uniquely unfair about the situation. Key word is uniquely. Because yes, you have every right to feel angry and sad and righteously indignant about it. It sucks. The worst thing that ever happened to you, even. But also, ask yourself this: who am I to compare my sufferings to that of others? Have I walked in a thousand shoes? Have I conveniently ignored all of the times my luck and good fortune lead me to the right door? Or simply, is it really, really as bad as it seems?
One evening last October, all of us (me, David, Norah, Ira) had a bad day. Everybody was grumpy. It was around 10pm when shit went down, both kids crying, parents exhausted. I forgot who came up with the idea, but we proceeded to write on a piece of paper called “Smooke Day of Bad Stuff”. We each went around and asked each other to describe the worst thing that happened today, in order. We counted them all with tally marks (seen below). We went around and around until we ran out of bad things to talk about. At some point, “Smooke Day of bad stuff” turned into a funny family therapy session instead. We said “Bi bi bad day” and physically wiped it away on our butts 😂 It didn’t change the fact that we all individually had a very bad day. It couldn’t, really. But it did help us go to bed and not continue thinking that tomorrow, too, will be bad.
The “Smooke Day of Bad Stuff” tallies & signatures from all of us 😂
The power of balancing the masculine and the feminine
Using words like “power”, “actions” & “warrior” in the previous section make me take a hard look at my own relationship with masculinity. Raised in the Eastern culture of Vietnam but grown up in Western culture of international education and American capitalism, I have very strong, and very mixed, feelings about masculinity and feminity.
I’m of the belief that Western culture primarily revolves around masculinity, which I simplify as the need for actions and resolutions, in other words “do something”. It evolves less around femininity, which I simplify as the need for inaction & acceptance, in other words “let it be” (Fun fact: “let it be” is the song I had David sing over & over to me when I was in labor with Norah, my first child 😂) I have to simplify, because obviously masculine & feminine energy encompass much more than that, but we don’t have all day.
Let’s say, you get hurt. The masculine response is to resolve that hurt right then and there by doing something, such as to apply medicine, blame whatever stupid circumstances that lead to this specific pain, or at the very least, to work hard to move past the hurt and suppress its intensity. The feminine response, is to simply let it be. Feel the hurt. Let the pain be the pain. Not trying to move past it. Letting it wash over you like rain.
The masculine response emphasizes righteousness, urgency, & strength. The feminine response anchors on patience, harmony, & flexibility. The masculine response doesn’t just come from men, neither does the feminine response just come from women. We each have both within us. It’s an energy and a vibe, not a gender thing. Eastern philosophy calls this Yin & Yang. The Google Brain researcher, public speaker and best-selling author Mo Gawdat have a lot to say about this topic too. I highly recommend any and all podcast with his guest appearance.
I thoroughly believe that there will be fewer wars, fewer conflicts, & less general suffering if people simply just lean more on their feminine response. Sometimes the answer is that there’s no answer. You just have to accept and let it be.
Of course, it’s not enough to just have feminine energy in this world. We need forces of actions to move things forward, build bridges, make rockets, turn dreams into reality. But we also need the art, beauty for its own sake, creative expressions, “sitting with your own feelings”, and, doing “nothing” (A book I really like is called How to do Nothing, highly recommend).
I’ll end this section with a quote:
Be like water. Strong enough to hold a ship, but able to slip through fingers.
I think water is perfectly both masculine and feminine. We all should be more like it.
As good as it gets
I discussed the concept of happiness being independent of wealth in my 33rd birthday reflection here, and I’m still thoroughly believing in it. I’d like to take it a step further and propose this concept to you, which is: what if, this is as good as it gets? In other words, what if you can simply… choose to be happy?
You might think: I’ll (finally) be happy once I achieved (x). x could be anything. Graduate from school. Get a good job. Get a promotion. Raise money. Get married. Travel the world. Have kids. Have x number in the bank. Retire. The list goes on.
Whatever x is, I can guarantee you this: once you get there, you actually won’t feel any different than what you are feeling right now, in a sustained manner. Sure, you might get a rush of dopamine right away. It might even last for a few days. But what always follows is a sunken feeling of “now what?”, because subtly in your head you have moved the goal post. Living your life and depending your happiness on any kind of goal post (not just financial ones) is not a sustainable way to have a good life.
SPOILER ALERT (this section below discusses things about Soul the movie and the TV series The Good Place. If you don’t wanna know details/how they end, don’t read)
I really love the Pixar movie “Soul”. The movie is about Joe Gardner, a struggling middle school music teacher’s quest for “meaning”. He even died once to find it. Throughout the movie, his whole thesis was that his life was meaningless because he apparently had wasted it not following his calling. He thought that, once he followed his calling (in this case, being a musician in a band), he’d find true meaning and true happiness. But Joe achieving that lifelong calling (which he eventually did) is not how the movie ends. The movie ends a while later, with Joe learning the biggest lesson of all, which is that happiness does not really come from “meaning”, really. It is moments of life fully lived that give him reason to be. With or without being in the band or dying, he had already experienced sparks of joy all along.
Or, let’s take example of another show I equally love (and also mentioned in my last birthday reflection), the Good Place. In season 4, all 4 main characters of the show finally went to the real deal Good Place (the show’s code for “Heaven”) They got there just to realize that every single person who finally went to heaven because they were so good on Earth was utterly miserable, and their brains had turned to literal mush. Their lives had been stripped of all context. No more suffering. No more meaning. No more joy. The only way for them to feel any sort of ways again, is to be presented with a way to finally… die. Exit Heaven. Go through a door. Have life end whenever they choose for it to end. In other words, just good old regular living on Earth.
SPOILER ENDS
Okay, not to end on a political note but I kinda love that the Kamala’s quote that got taken out of context about the coconut tree became super viral. The original quote is:
You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.
And I kept thinking about how beautiful it is. We are a mosaic of everybody we ever love and lose, everything we ever have and let go, all the good, all the bad. We do not get to pick and choose what’s great about our life and leave out the bad stuff, even if we were afforded a do-over. So, the best you can do is to just live life to the fullest, appreciate it as is, and don’t wait until certain things to happen, in order to finally be happy. Remember:
Life is meant to be lived but most people spend it planning to live - Mo Gawdat.
In other words: This is as good as it gets. Enjoy the ride.
Some other thoughts
Again - that’s all my more complete thoughts this year. Thanks for reading them through! I jotted these down over the course of 12 months and left out a lot of smaller, less fully formed thoughts in simple bullet points down below, in case you are in search for a “snack” and not a “meal”, when it comes to random ramblings 😂
For the record, I will always want the long version in response to the question “how are you?” I’m at the age where I really need to know how you really are (yes, the heartbreak, the disease, the family drama, give it all to me), and not how you think about the weather. Life is too short, and frankly both of us are too busy to waste time on surface level stuff.
This year, I learn the weight of a very important phrase, “in good faith”. I’m the kind of person who’d always give people the benefit of the doubt and assume they mean well before they prove me otherwise. But the phrase “in good faith” makes me think. Are their arguments in good faith? Are their concerns in good faith? Do they show what they are showing in good faith? Sometimes, when I realize that people don’t totally act in good faith, I stop giving them the benefit of the doubt. Trust, but verify.
Creative expression is an inherently selfish endeavor. There’s no need to mask it as anything else rather than what it is, a self-serving process. And if in that process, other people benefit, great! But the first person who benefits from it should be me, the creator. I make art for my own good. I write thoughts for personal self-reflection (I always say it’s my personal therapy through words). I might be the only consumer of my own art, and that’s okay. Nobody else owes me an audience. If even I don’t believe my own things, then there lies the first original problem. Fix that.
The brain is a flawed computer. A supercomputer, but super flawed. It auto-deletes even important stuff. Memories are unreliable. Just like in that Inside out scene, the memory workers randomly take away precious memories to make room for new ones. So, don’t trust that you will remember everything. Write it down. Record it. Back it up. You will thank yourself later.
A person is not defined by the things that happen to them. They are defined by how they react to things that happen to them.
Baby clothes are the avocados of textiles. They are very desirable and considered “good” but there’s a very narrow window where they fit perfect and then you miss the boat.
People tend to be incredibly short-sighted. Overestimate what can be done in 1 year but underestimate what can be done in 5 years. That includes me.
If you didn’t sleep well don’t do anything different the next day. Insomnia happens sometimes from the overcorrection of one single night of bad sleep.
Until next year, thank you again for entertaining my birthday ramblings! 6th year in a row I’ve done this and I’ve loved every single moment.
Linh
