Make Things Better: An Introduction
How much of our lives do we spend waiting? Waiting for better weather, better leadership, better health. More free time, more energy, more money, more support.
It’s never the right time to do the thing we’ve been meaning to do, because someone or something else beyond our control is making things difficult. Once that’s over with, we tell ourselves, we’ll absolutely get around to doing the thing we yearn to do.
What if you knew — for absolute certain — that things were never going to get better?
This is, essentially, what terminal cancer did for me. There are stages involved in a healthy reaction to this type of calamity.
You fully realize that today, with all its discomfort or outright terror, is as good as things will ever get, for the rest of your life.
You rage. Things SHOULD be better. It isn’t fair! You keep imagining what you could do if the truth were otherwise. You hurl paper airplanes of “should” and “shouldn’t” against the brick wall of “is.”
The brick wall implacably, uncaringly endures. As you exhaust yourself folding and throwing, folding and throwing, the wall asserts its existence again and again without breaking a sweat.
Finally you stop fighting brick with paper. Your rage turns to grief, and you collapse.
Eventually you either give into despair — in which case your story is over by your own choice — or you run out of tears, you look around, and you ask yourself, what now?
Suddenly, perversely, you are set free. The shackles of Waiting shatter. You realize: the time is Now.
One by one, you check off every item on your life’s wish list, because the conditions you once placed on doing them have vanished. Somehow, in this terrible state, you are more powerful than you have ever been.