The Transformative Power of Loss
As much as I consider myself a spiritual person, I have no patience with some aspects of new age philosophy. I find a lot of it to be grounded in dangerous magical thinking.
One of the ideas that really get to me is the notion that everything is perfect. With this, I strongly disagree. Everything is not perfect. There have always been, and continue to be terrible things happening in our world.
I heard this morning that the Ebola crisis in West Africa has reached “unprecedented” proportions, with over 5000 infected, 2500 dead and 300-400 new cases per day. I can’t see how anyone could consider this to be “perfect.”
Countries around the world are mobilizing aid workers and supplies to send to West Africa, to try and help contain the outbreak and treat the infected. No-one would be doing this if they considered the outbreak as part of the “perfection” of our world.
When we see everything in the world as perfect, it makes it impossible for us to experience loss, and loss is the only real motivator for change. If we don’t recognize that there’s a real and immanent threat of loss, or if we haven’t had a devastating experience of loss, we aren’t going to make the effort to change anything.
When we don’t see anything as bad, or problematic, we have no will to improve things, for ourselves or for others. When everything is “perfect,” the status quo is perfectly acceptable.
We need to let go of the fantasy that life is perfect, and that we have unlimited chances to mess up before we get it right. In reality, many of our choices are irrevocable; we have to see when the choices we’re making are setting us up for tragic outcomes, or we’ll fail to prevent things that could have easily been avoided, otherwise.
When we see that our choices potentially have real, painful consequences, we can then take responsibility for what we’re doing. If we see everything as “perfect,” it’s easy to be lazy and irresponsible. Everything’s fine, so we don’t have to change.
It’s a form of insanity in our world today that nothing is really wrong, and that everything is as it’s meant to be. Try telling that to a mother whose child was just killed by a drunk driver, or to a 32 year old woman with recurrent ovarian cancer, or a worker who just got their arm mangled in some machinery.
The truth is that bad things do happen; tragedies occur every moment of every day. It’s the bad that makes us appreciate the good, and it’s the contrast that motivates us to create more of the good and to strive to prevent as much of the bad as possible.
No one would be doing cancer research if all the deaths from this terrible disease were considered “perfect”; no-one would be campaigning against drunk driving or for workplace safety, either. We wouldn’t have sent help to New Orleans after the hurricane, or to China and Haiti after their devastating earthquakes if we saw these events as “meant to be.”
None of the positive changes that we’ve made in our society would have occurred if we considered everything that was happening as “perfect.” This new-age lunacy claims to promote peace and contentment but in reality promotes passivity and complacency.
Sexual assault of female students on campus? Perfect. Racially-motivated murder in the streets? Perfect. Climate change? Perfect. Decimation of our pollinators? Perfect. And nothing is done to improve any of these situations when we live by this distorted philosophy.
I suspect that one reason that the new-agers want to see everything as “perfect” and “meant to be” is that it’s painful to experience loss. They would rather tell themselves that it’s all OK, so that they don’t have to acknowledge their pain.
Unfortunately, we can’t escape the reality of loss. If we choose the insanity of denying loss and tell ourselves that everything bad that happens was “meant to be,” so that it won’t hurt as much, it will only result in more hurtful things occurring.
We only have the power to improve things for ourselves and our world by seeing that loss is part of our existence, and a painful one, at that.
Loss, when we acknowledge it, can motivate us to transform our world for the better. Every great invention, every important social advancement, every major political upheaval was motivated by loss. Denying loss, and the pain it brings, only leads to stagnation and backward movement.
The next time you’ve experienced a tragic loss and someone tells you, “Oh it’s all perfect! It’s meant to be. Everything happens for a reason,” you can look them straight in the eye and tell them that they have no clue of what they’re talking about.
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About the Author
Marcia Sirota MD FRCP(C) is a board-certified psychiatrist, that does not ascribe to any one theoretical school. Rather, she has integrated her education and life experiences into a unique approach to the practice of psychotherapy. She considers herself a realist with a healthy measure of optimism. Sign up here for her free monthly wellness newsletter. Listen here to her latest podcast. marciasirotamd.com
