Ups and Downs

It’s said that life is full of ups and downs. It’s great when we experience the ups, but none of us likes the downs. But just as the waves rise, so must they fall.

Those downs are the bumps along the road, the disappointments that come our way. Bumps seem easier to deal with, since they can happen and disappear instantly. But disappointments . . . they can stay with us, alter our mindset. In fact, it can be hard to deal with disappointments, especially when they seem unsurmountable. It’s like rooting for your favorite sports team and they end up losing again and again. You hope that they’ll end their losing streak on their next game, but when they lose again, you feel defeated–like there is no way to escape this dreary cloud that hangs over them–and you.

Sometimes I look at disappointment like a passing season–something that occurs temporarily for a day or two. It occurs in life in all sorts of ways, from someone applying to colleges and they didn’t get into their number one choice, to a player (or a team) that didn’t win a game, or to any of us upon hearing bad news from someone close to us or on the news. And when we hear enough bad news, the streak begins to set in, and we begin to accept it as the norm, although somewhere in the back of our minds, we know that it’s not.

On the other hand, disappointment can drive us to do better, to try harder, to change how we’ve been doing things to achieve a successful outcome. It can lead us to introspection and to reevaluate what our expectations are of others and of ourselves. And when we come to understand disappointment, we know that it’s an entirely different thing to be disappointed at ourselves for not doing better or not making wiser or smarter choices versus being disappointed with a team or with something as intangible as the Stockmarket, which didn’t perform to our liking.

When disappointment happens, it can feel like it’s shaking the foundation of what we believe, plunging us into a mindset of defeat. But just as we plunge into it, so can we rise up from it too. Overcoming disappointment depends on how we react to it and deal with it, in seeing it as more of a trial, a test, an aberration in life, rather than something that’s permanent or impossible to overcome. In this sense, a disappointment is merely a down amongst many in the ups and downs of our journey. It’s a reminder that our path is never smooth and easy, but one teeming with challenges as well as victories.