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Doorways of Support
and Inspiration: THE ANSWER TO "WHY
ME?"-THE FIRST PRINCIPLE Maxine Schnall, An Excerpt from What Doesn’t
Kill You Makes You Stronger:Turning Bad Breaks Into
Blessings (Perseus
Publishing, This is a true story. A man who was down on his luck, out of work and feeling hopeless
about the future, decided that he was going to commit suicide. He wanted
to give God one last chance, so he made a deal. "God, if you want me to go
on living, give me a call," he said. "I'll wait ten minutes, and if
the phone doesn't ring, I'm out of here." He sat by the telephone and
waited. The minutes ticked by. One...two...three...four...five...At the count
of nine, the phone rang. The man picked it up. There was no one on the other
end of the line. The man took this as a sign from God that he should not give
up. He threw the pills he was going to take down the sink, got on with his
life, and eventually found success. Did God
really make the phone ring or was it pure coincidence? We'll never know. The point
is, had this man given in to his darkest impulses, he never would have lived
long enough to find out that the seemingly hopeless situation he was in was not
hopeless at all. Help from the universe is always available to us, even in our
bleakest moments, if we open our hearts to it. The moment we stand outside
ourselves and connect with a higher intelligence than our limited rational
minds, we set miracles in motion. I'm not a
psychic. I don't have a crystal ball, but I can tell you with absolute certainty
that whatever excruciating crisis you're going through right now-your spouse
has left you, you've been fired from your job, you've been diagnosed with a
serous illness-is not only without hope; it has hidden riches in it. What you
wish had never happened to you will in time bring you benefits beyond anything
you can imagine if you remove the blocks to receiving them. I know this because
I've seen this phenomenon happen time and time again in my own life and in the
lives of countless people who've come through the doors of my counseling agency
over the course of 28 years. Even the premature death of someone you love,
heartbreaking as it is, can transform you and inspire you to honor that
person's memory beyond anything you might have done had your loved one not been
snatched away so quickly. Some of the people you'll meet later in this book
will show you how. The trouble
with a blessing in disguise is that, because it's hidden, it seems like nothing
more than a cruel or senseless event. When my younger daughter Rona was a
teenager, she broke her femur in a car accident. I rushed to the hospital to
find her lying on a gurney, bloodied and in pain, screaming, "Why
me?" I had no answer. All I could do was hold her hand and try to assure
her that the doctor would take care of her, everything would be all
right - and it was. I now know
that this universal "Why me?" when misfortune strikes is not really a
question, but a cry of shock and outrage at the unfairness of life.
Philosophically, we might understand that good and evil, life and death, and
health and sickness are part of the complementary positive/negative design of
our physical world, that one can't exist without its opposite, any more than we
can have light without darkness. It's only when the dark side of the moon looks
down on us that we feel singled out for undeserved punishment. But life is just
being life. Like my husband's Uncle Phil used to say in his untutored,
immigrant wisdom, "Shouldn't happen what
can." THE
ANSWER TO "WHY ME?" The amazing
thing is that when you ask, "Why me?" not out of paranoia, but as a
questioning of what your life means and how you should live it-not questioning
God, but questioning yourself-you immediately begin the process of transforming
yourself from a hostage to fortune to the architect of your own destiny. The
desire to learn, change, and grow stronger from a painful event instantly
connects you to a positive energy system that helps you not only weather this
storm, but also gives you control over the course of your life from now on.
Staying connected to that positive energy system by following some basic
principles frees you from being at the mercy of outside events and gives you a
consistent feeling of inner calm and confidence. You will know that whatever is
happening right now, or will happen in the future, is right for you in terms of
your ultimate happiness and fulfillment. What
follows is the First Principle... 1. EMBRACE MISFORTUNE AS
AN Here's the
Number One Paradox of Life: the crises that trouble us the most are the very
instruments for gaining permanent peace of mind. Your heart may be broken, but
your soul must embrace them. The one right answer to the question, "Why
me?" is to say yes to misfortune as an opportunity for transformation. Use
it as a catalyst for growth. Answer the call of your soul to replace fear with
certainty, being reactive with being creative, self-involvement with sharing,
and you will draw positive energy that will enrich you immeasurably. Hindsight shows
us that without this tragedy or trouble, such a feared and despised intruder in
our lives, we might never have learned to appreciate the people who matter most
to us or developed talents we didn't know we had or resolved some emotional
issue or discovered how to satisfy our basic desires in some larger purpose
that brings true happiness. Surrendering
to misfortune is an act of pure faith-it's knowing
that in the way the spiritual world operates, an apparently bad situation is
also essentially for the good in the long run. This certainty that everything
in our physical world derives from the positive energy of the unseen spiritual
world is the magic wand that transmutes the "bad things" into good.
Remember those fire drills you used to have in school? The alarm scared you out
of your wits until you realized that this was only a test. Well, that's how it
is with our afflictions. They're not curses, they're only tests to discover
whether you'll react in panic or take control of the situation for your own benefit.
The real danger is the urge to abandon your faith in the creative life force of
the universe and not maintain your trust in its goodness. Your conviction that
something better lies ahead is the seed of its creation. What makes positive
outcomes happen is not "seeing is believing"-the
distrustful attitude of skeptics-but the absolute certainty that, to quote Kabbalist Rav Berg,
"believing is seeing." I realize
that if you lost a loved one in the appalling terrorist attacks or your spouse
has just died of a sudden heart attack or you've been told that the tumor you
thought was benign is cancer or you learn that the healthy baby you were having
has been born with defects or you've lost all your savings in an investment you
hoped would make you a millionaire, you don't want to hear or can't believe
that everything bad that happens can also be for the best. But the sooner you
suspend your disbelief, the more quickly you will rebound. The blessing may not
be visible for a long time-not until you have the 20-20 vision of hindsight-but
if you believe it, you will see it somewhere down the line. Adversity is
like a mystery novel. The uncertainty about the outcome makes you want to jump
ahead to the last page to find out how the story ends, but that would defeat
the purpose of the reading experience. You can't find the rewards this crisis
will bring you until you've put all the clues together and deciphered the
meaning you'll ultimately attach to it. You'll know how you've come out ahead
after you've gone the full distance-gone through your sadness, fear, anger,
confusion, and the whole process of rebuilding your life and establishing new
connections. Then you'll find that this crisis has remade you into a wiser,
deeper, even happier person than you were before. If you knew in advance why
this misfortune could be the best thing that ever happened to you, you'd miss
the whole point of the exercise. You would not keep looking for the pony in the
pile of manure until you find it. Only in
retrospect, when you look back on painful, tragic events that tear your world
apart, can you see that there is always unexpected good buried somewhere in the
worst. For now, you have to believe that, believe it with all your heart.
Holding fast to that belief when you think that life has treated you badly will
give you the power to persevere until the answer to the question, "Why
me?" becomes manifest. Excerpted from What
Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger:Turning
Bad Breaks Into Blessings (Perseus Publishing, Maxine Schnall is a popular self-help expert,
author, and media personality who has appeared frequently on national TV. She
is the author of six books and co-author of one. Her third book, Limits: A Search for New Values (Clarkson Potter/Crown, 1981)
was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Maxine hosted her own long-running call-in
radio show on the CBS station in
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