PEr Chronicles: The upside of down

Dropped out of school at age 14, Nikhil Kamath is now 34 and India’s youngest billionaire. Having struggled to form a career in chess, he and his brother Nithin, taught themselves to trade. They founded Zerodha in 2010 and are now worth $1.55bn.

We humans are very attached to outcomes. We say we trust God but behind the scenes we work our fingers to the bone and our emotions get into a tangled fray trying to control our outcomes. We praise God when our normal looks like what we thought it would. We question God when it doesn’t. And walk away from Him when we have a sinking suspicion that God is the one who set fire to the hope that hold us together.

Even the most grounded people can feel hijacked by the winds of unpredictable change. I ride this struggle bus. But I’m never comfortable with the fact that I can’t grab the wheel and drive it back to Normal.

This isn’t how I pictured my life right now. And this probably isn’t exactly how you thought things would look in your life right now either. I’m not telling you anything new. I’m just giving voice to thoughts you’ve already had but maybe didn’t know how to verbalize.

This thought comes like a whisper through the smaller disappointments. A bad haircut. A burned dinner. A child who won’t listen today. A scale that keeps going up and a bank account that keeps going down.

Then the whisper graduates into a louder voice with the friend who goes silent for a while. The job you didn’t get. The harsh words spoken to you by someone you’re desperate to hear some encouragement from. That underlying sense that your relationship has grown cold while your conversations are constantly heated. The lonely feeling you didn’t think you’d have at this stage of life.

Then the disappointment roars with earth-shattering thunder with a call from the doctor and a diagnosis that flips life upside down. The child you don’t know anymore. The fire. The bankruptcy. The breakup. The death so unexpected.

Life isn’t turning out the way we thought it would. It’s that feeling things should be better than they are. People should be better than they are. Circumstances should be better than they are. Finances should be better than they are. Relationships should be better than they are.

The shiniest of things is headed in the direction of becoming dull. New will always eventually become old. Followers unfollow. People who lift us up will let us down. The most tightly knit aspects of life snag, unravel and disintegrate before our very eyes.

And we are so epically disappointed.

A soul-shaking silence and disappointment about my current situation is what goes to bed with me in the dark. And this reality is still there each time my eyes open to the next new day. And the next. And the next. I don’t say this to invite you into any sort of pity party but to say I understand how hard it is when deep disappointment linger on and on. You probably have middle-of-the-night moments of wrestling through your own tears.

The glaring disappointment of negative pregnancy tests month after month while your closest friends are decorating their soon-to-be-filled nurseries. The emptiness in your heart because that person you love doesn’t seek to really understand you, rarely cheers you on and doesn’t seem to want to connect intimately with you. The draining frustration of never being the one chosen for the job you’ve dreamed about for a long, long time. The excruciating fear of watching your kids make poor choices. The heartbreak of that friendship that fell apart despite your best efforts to hold it together. The painful symptoms of a chronic illness that leave you feeling weak, frustrated and misunderstood. The weight of living with so much financial debt that you can’t enjoy your life or the people in it.

My life had gone from feeling full and whole to being obliterated beyond recognition. We live in a broken world where broken things happen. So it’s not surprising that things get broken in our lives as well. But what about those times when things aren’t just broken, but shattered beyond repair? At least when things are broken there’s some hope you can glue the pieces back together. But what if things are broken into dust and there aren’t even pieces to pick up in front of you? You can’t glue dust.

What was once something so very precious is now reduced to nothing but weightless powder. We feel desperately hopeless.

We think the shattering in our lives could not possibly be for any good. But what if shattering is the only way to get dust back to its basic form so that something new can be made?

Think about a plain piece of ice. If ice stays in a cube, it will always be just a square of ice. But if ice melts it can be poured into a beautiful form to reshape it when frozen again. Dust is much the same; it’s the basic ingredient with such great potential for new life. And when mixed with water, dust becomes clay. Clay, when placed in the potter’s hands, can be formed into anything the potter dreams up!

What if the worst parts of your life are actually gateways to the very best parts you’d never want to do without?