Life's Lemons

Ten years ago, I realized I knew a lot of people who had trouble dealing with change in their lives. I would get asked over and over, "What do you do when bad things happen, or disappointing things, unexpected and difficult things?" People wanted strategies for handling challenges in their lives.

I had grown up hearing the old adage, "When life hands you lemons, make lemonade," which pretty much sums up the attitude of the ancient stoic philosophers toward the problem, but in my childhood no one who repeated these words also explained how to do it. How do you turn lemons into lemonade? So I got to work, reading all the great thinkers on the topic, and writing my own book of advice. It was called "Lemonade!" Then I changed the name to "Lemons to Lemonade" and after 24 total re-writes, it became "Plato's Lemonade Stand: Stirring Change into Something Great." Previous versions have been turned down by publishers 45 times, because they're not convinced that a practical book about the personal alchemy needed to turn something sour into something sweet will sell. I'm convinced they're wrong. And whenever I've done the ideas on retreats, people have insisted on having the book available. No one has seen the newest version yet. And I really, really like it. But I'm prepared for more lemonade making before someone in the world of publishing says, "Wait. People need this."

In the Sunday Business Section of the New York Times, Adam Bryant had a very interesting interview with the fashion designer and design mogul Diane von Furstenberg. Let me give you one Q&A:

Q. You’ve said many times that your mother was your biggest influence. What are the most important lessons you learned from her?

A. My mother was a Holocaust survivor and, having survived 13 months in the concentration camps, she taught me that fear is not an option. And no matter what happens, never be a victim. Life is a journey, and when you face obstacles the only thing you can do is accept them and embrace the reality. Very often, with things that are bad or not what you wanted, it’s your job to turn them into something positive.

I love the sentiment about accepting obstacles. Maybe the things that block your path can be taken up and assembled into just the bridge you need. That last sentence of the answer says it all:

Very often, with things that are bad or not what you wanted, it’s your job to turn them into something positive.

That's one of the enduring themes of the practical philosophers. And it's become something I believe deeply. So, when you face your next challenge, difficulty, or disappointment, get out a paring knife, some sugar, ample ice, and whatever additional spices you think you'll like, and make from the lemons that confront you some world class lemonade. Plato would have wanted it.

Good Grief, Charlie Brown.

Recently, I asked readers for some topics they'd like to see me blog on. I got lots of suggestions. I've written on two of them already. Today, I'll tackle a tough one, and briefly: Grief.

Grief is an experience and expression of great value lost. We can grieve the passing of a family member, a friend, a pet, or our youth. We can grieve the loss of a job, or a marriage, or the demise of a great business. 

Grief, like most emotions, can be rational or irrational. It would make no sense to grieve the loss of a potato chip. And there are probably philosophical conditions for sensible grief. It makes sense for me to grieve the loss of people and animals I've known, in a way that it might not, regarding people and animals whose passing I rationally know must be happening around the world, but with whom I've never had contact. In one of his early movies, Woody Allen's character says something like, "If one guy is starving somewhere in the world, it puts a crimp in my day." And I get that. I feel a keen regret about the suffering and loss around the world that happens every day - at least, when I have the time to think about it. But my experience of that is not quite the same thing as grief.

Grief is personal. And it can be good. If a person or relationship or endeavor or hope has indeed been of great value, and of great value to you, it would make no sense to experience its loss without such an emotional recognition of its value. The stoic philosophers wanted to avoid any disturbing emotion, but, as I've pointed out in my book The Stoic Art of Living, in a discussion of Epictetus, they went too far. Epictetus even went so far as to think that on hearing of the death of your son or spouse, you should react exactly as you would if you had heard instead that someone else's son or spouse had died. And that makes no sense at all. It would signal a pathology, or emotional void that isn't properly human.

But what Aristotle said about anger is also appropriate concerning grief. In order to evaluate its experience in our lives, he urged us to ask questions like: For whom? On account of what? How intense? And for how long? As a philosopher I believe that things and people can have objective value. And I think they can also have subjective value, which constitutes the manner and degree with which we place value on them. Part of rational living is to acknowledge anything that has objective value with a subjective response proportionate to it. Of course, we can value personal possessions, or a tree in the backyard, with our own special subjectivity, tracking the history we have with such things, and our subjective response can in such cases go far beyond any question of objective value, but when there is high objective value, or an appropriately elevated subjective value, grief is an altogether appropriate response to loss.

But grief must have limits, in order to be good - limits of both intensity and duration. In order to honor the high value of something or someone who has been lost, we don't have to inflict on ourselves the other great losses that would result from being totally overwhelmed and shut down for a long period of time by overly intense or prolonged grief. We have a responsibility to ourselves and those who remain around us to be as strong as we can, and make efforts to stay on the path that life has provided us, remembering that, despite any loss, there are many gains and even joys that can await us, and be brought to others by us, if we can regain our equilibrium.

No one promised us that life would be easy and without loss. In fact, as great philosophers have understood, we need difficulty and loss to refine us and goad us to grow into the full maturity that life can afford us.

To know good grief is to know a part of that growth.