The Inevitable Truth of Life–Things Go Wrong
By Marcy Kennedy (@MarcyKennedy)
How do you face the difficult times in life?
Over the weekend, my husband and I went to see The Martian, and this is the question I walked away with.
In The Martian, Mark Watney is part of the team of astronauts who went on a Mars mission. Due to a storm, they had to leave the surface of Mars before their allotted time was over. During preparation for lift off, Watney was injured and lost in the storm. The team thought he was dead and had to launch without him–leaving him stranded on Mars, a planet where nothing grows, with no breathable atmosphere, and extreme weather conditions.
I don’t want to spoil too many of the story details for you, but Watney doggedly manages to survive on Mars until he’s able to be rescued, years later.
Once back on earth, Watney becomes an instructor, teaching astronaut candidates. In his first class, he tells them the one inevitable truth of space travel.
At some point, everything will go wrong.
That’s not an if. It’s a when. And when everything goes wrong, there’s really only one thing you can do if you want to survive.
You have to focus on one problem at a time.
The movie was talking about space and what you face there, but it’s also the one inevitable truth about life.
At some point in your life, everything will go wrong. Horribly, heart-breakingly, hope-crushingly wrong.
And there’s only one thing you can do if you want to survive. You focus on one problem at a time.
The big picture—that’s going to be more than we can handle when life blows up in our face. Because if we look at the big picture, it’ll seem impossible to overcome. We’ll feel too weak, too unprepared, too alone. Too everything.
But one problem at a time…well, we can find the strength for that one small thing. Just that thing. Only that thing.
And then the next one.
And the next one.
And one day, we’ll look up, and we’ll have made it out the other side. We’ll have survived.
And if we’re really brave, one day we’ll do what Mark Watney did. We’ll take what we’ve learned and use it to help teach others how to survive. Because at some point in their lives, everything will go wrong.
And what will matter most if they want to survive is knowing how to face it without giving up.
Have you faced a time in your life when everything seemed to go wrong? What helped you through?
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Oct 13, 2015 @ 14:26:01
Marcy, thank you for the reminder to focus on one “problem” at a time. 🙂
Oct 14, 2015 @ 15:49:06
I write about the things I need to hear and hope they help someone else as well 🙂
Oct 13, 2015 @ 16:17:25
Marcy, I am someone who can preach this sermon with fervor! I am a mystery author and editor of FundsforWriters.com because I faced a divorce with a creepy stalker, a bribery investigation with real life agents, and my friends and family turning away from me in one year. It about did me in. I crawled out one tiny moment at a time, which then became days, then weeks, until it was about 3 years later and I decided to write my experiences and get it out of my head. Long story short, I entered the writing world with a vengeance. If I had not had my world ripped apart, I would be on a different path. When we embrace and choose to grow from our chaos, we become such tremendously different people.
Oct 14, 2015 @ 15:58:28
Thank you for sharing your story. It’s so encouraging to hear about people who’ve been through the worst and can now see how it brought them to a place that brings them joy. One of the things that I find helps me as well is to look back on the roughest parts of my life and so see how they helped me grow.
Oct 13, 2015 @ 22:53:16
Great advice. Sometimes it’s hard to apply. But when we do, things look much more manageable. 🙂
Oct 14, 2015 @ 15:48:31
It’s almost always hard to apply, especially when the problems just seem to keep adding up. But I haven’t found a better way to deal with it at present 🙂