“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” -Victor Frankl
In 2021, I was running a half-marathon in Milwaukee.
I met a fellow runner, we chatted and introduced each other.
He said he was running many 5ks and 10ks the previous year.
Unfortunately, on half-marathon day, I saw him throwing up blood stains.
I asked him, “do you have liver problems? I’m also seeing your eyes and face yellow.”
He said, “I don’t know.”
In the meantime, one of the volunteers came up and drove him to the local hospital.
Doctors found he has high liver enzyme but they couldn’t figure out the reason for it.
Later, I came to know he was moved to the bigger hospital at Chicago, where he was diagnosed with Wilson’s disease associated with hepatitis C.
Wilson disease is a rare autoimmune blood disorder that causes copper to accumulate in the body.
His liver was damaged badly and lungs were filled with a lot of fluid.
Almost two and half years after that incident, we met again in the runner’s club and he recalled and shared some of his past experiences.
He said, “I was only a few moments away from death many times in my past life.”
But fortunately, after his liver transplant, though it wasn’t easy, he got a new life.
Now he has a beautiful family, a loving wife and a healthy daughter around him.
He is doing well, he owns a used car dealership in the suburb of Milwaukee.
He said, “I’m making great progress in my life.”
Progress and meaning of life
I asked him what is progress for you?
He said, “At this stage in my life, my definition of progress is little different, if my daughter is doing better than me, then that is progress. The difference between success and failure for me is the difference between a life of joy and a life of stress.
In his words, the gap between joy and stress indicates how well we manage the challenge of making a meaning in our life.
“I always had linear expectations in my life but I always ended with nonlinear realities,” he said.
He was coming with the expectation to finish the half-marathon that day but ended up in hospital bed after not even finishing two miles.
“I had an unusual life throughout my past, I always had recurrent health problems, I always suffered,” he added.
Dr. Viktor Frankl, MD, PhD, the father of the modern meaning movement and an author of “Man’s Search for Meaning” says, “you don’t have to suffer to learn, but if you don’t learn from suffering then your life becomes truly meaningless.”
As we all know, merely understanding our core life problem, whatever it is, even if we can’t do anything about it, gives us a sense of control and sense of satisfaction.
By forcing ourselves to learn what’s happening to our life, we come to accept the reality, the reality of the problem.
We become a catalyst in our own thinking and move towards the solution.
Current jobs and toxic environment
In our conversation, he said that he changed seven jobs in his career.
In his last job, he had five reorgs, four bosses, four moves, one failed marriage, and five years later he had his own car dealership.
“One influential thing I learned from my weak health is I created love for social and cultural overlap in our society, I developed a strong sense of empathy, kindness, and belonging around me so that my desire really sharpened to respect differences in our society.
I guess that’s what I was looking for in my life.
The essence of being me is shared emotions, connections and respect around us,” he said.
One day on his last job, he walked home to his one bedroom apartment and reviewed all credit cards, wondering how he could cut expenses.
He reviewed everything including his savings, possessions, and all the holes for expenses.
He figured out he could disconnect cable, phone, netflix, and use free channels and pre-paid phones.
He stopped eating out, and buying clothes, shoes, and any other extra things.
He finally calculated he could survive for fifteen months from his savings.
Next day he walked into his very toxic boss’s office and quit on the spot.
“How did you get the courage to do that?” I asked.
He answered, “The pain of staying with toxicity was greater than the pain of leaving the toxicity.
We live in a time when most of our circumstances in life start with I not we. I have to start somewhere.”
A relationship with our boss is toxic if our well-being and dignity is threatened and we suffer emotionally, psychologically, and even physically.
“Belonging is a strong feeling which I never had in my last job. Belonging comes from developing and maintaining close relationships either with family members, friends, coworkers, or bosses,” he said.
Personality and a right job
Harvard study has found that the only thing that really matters in life is your relationship to other people.
Charles Duhigg, an author of “Supercommunicators” says, “ With the right tools, we can make relationships with anyone.”
If we feel disconnected with other people then it hurts our dignity.
He left the job because he was disconnected and found no value in the working place.
“I’m not saying everyone should quit their job and have their own business, you can be a great employee but the job you do must match with your personality, vision, and integrity,” he said.
“We must create the personality of passion and commitment for what we do, we should always enjoy what we perform.
If you think your personality and work environment are out of sync and chaotic, don’t waste time to change the system.
It takes a very long time to change the system and people and there is a high chance you’ll be unsuccessful.
Instead just quit it and move forward with your life,” he added.
“Of course, we have to accept that many short twists happen in everybody’s life, the only thing we have to do is step back and take a different path,” he continued.
Our life experiences provide a period of self-reflection and personal re-evaluation for every one of us.
By doing so we remain in motion with a series of reverberations that allows us to revisit our own identity.
This helps to force in our mind to ask what we generally don’t ask.
We often don’t ask what it is that gives us meaning and how that influences our life.
Self reflection, power and life investment
Self-reflection is a vigorous power, it is an introspection.
It is a mental strength to do good.
There are blessed people whose self-reflection do a lot of good things in society.
Obviously, greater the self-reflection greater the power.
Self-reflection is a tool to provide a path so that we can think properly in both personal and professional life.
A saying of Aristotle and his student Thomas Jefferson, ‘the pursuit of happiness’ has to do with an internal journey of learning to know ourselves and an external journey of service to others.
In reality, this journey is nothing but self-reflection.
Interestingly, self-reflection habit comes only after painful life experiences.
But whatever is the source, it helps us to pinpoint where and how to invest our time, money, and effort for the rest of our life.
In life, there are not many places we can invest.
The first place to invest is education.
We can invest in our own education or in the education of our children or grandchildren or in the education of children whose family cannot afford.
Investment choice also depends on in which stage we are in life.
My friend studied a lot and became educated from his many jobs for how to be a small business owner and became an owner of a car dealership.
From his childhood, as he said, he was a fan of different cars.
He enjoyed cars from different perspectives, that’s what he chose to do in his later part of his life and opened a car dealership business.
Experience and life lessons taught him what he wants to do for the rest of his life.
He said he is expanding his car business in different locations outside Milwaukee.
“Education could be formal or informal, both have the potential to increase one’s power to lead a fulfilling life with freedom of choice” he said.
He was always worried his whole life due to his poor health condition.
Therefore, for him, the second best investment in life is staying in good health by adopting a healthy lifestyle, especially food and exercise habits.
There is only one life, and the most priceless thing in life is good health.
Conclusion
As my friend said, the value for good health and education can not be measured, these two investments in life can affect our life in a lot of different ways.
Sadly, oftentimes, the value of these two investments we come to know late in life once time passes and we have either little or no time at all to restart.
In Abraham Maslow’s famous hierarchy theory what is above “self-actualization” is transcendence.
We can only realize this once we move beyond ourselves to see a greater fulfillment to serve the need and hope of others.
Greater fulfillment and service to others is possible only if we become educated and healthy.
“Life is a cause, a calling, a mission, and most importantly, a transcendent commitment beyond our self-interest, ” he added.
Stay educated and stay healthy everyone.
Yam Timsina, PhD, writes primarily on health basics, scientific progress, social upliftment, and value creation.