The Inevitable Truth of Life–Things Go Wrong

October 13, 2015 by Marcy Kennedy • Life at Warp 10, Marcy's Blog • Tags: hope, Marcy Kennedy, The Martian • 6 Comments

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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