You lose! And you lose! Everybody loses
I’ve experienced losses, big and small — just like everybody
1) Heartbreak: For example, I first wrote these words the same year a ten year long romantic relationship ended. That was definitely not the plan I had in mind, and the adjustment certainly took its toll.
Or, way worse, when my rescue dog Ronja passed away, after spending almost 5 years 24/7 with her. Since I was recently retired from the finance industry when I got her from the shelter I had all the time in the world for her. That made the involuntary and sudden separation all the more painful.
2) Severe psychological trauma: 44 years ago my big brother drowned in front of me and the rest of our family (I was 8 years when it happened), contributing to my parents’ divorce soon after. That was a double whammy psychologically. To add insult to injury, literally, I was being bullied at my new school partly because I was sad and introverted as a consequence of the family trauma. At eight to nine years old those were big downers, that came with significant long-term repercussions almost into my 50’s. Actually, come to think of it, I’ll never be fully healed, but that’s ok too.
3) Physical injury: I tore my left knee ACL when a drunk friend of a friend threw me into a wall at a party, and my leg hit it at a funny angle. He didn’t have quite the control over his body he thought he did, despite his martial art training. Some of us were just horsing around, when he just entered the seen, grabbed me, and threw me over his shoulder and into the wall. Bummer! Party crasher. Literally.
I later also tore my left hamstring, when going for a new deadlift personal best in the gym, as a follow up to the ACL rupture. My hamstring was still weakened by the ACL surgery, since I had material from it cut out to reconstruct the ACL.
I’ve actually torn my right ACL too, but that was my own fault and more than 20 years earlier when I was just 20. That time I didn’t even visit a doctor’s to check up on it until 13 years after the injury, since I had heard that if the pain wasn’t excruciating you simply can’t have torn it completely. Well, I had.
However, once diagnosed and operated, I revelled in being the best rehabilitator in the world, truly enjoying repairing myself and making sure the injured knee as well as the other one, the halved (and later semi-torn) hamstring, and my whole body would be not only restored but improved to a better shape than ever. My focus was instinctively on what I could do to heal, to improve, to become better, not on my bad luck or reduced physical capacity (temporarily or permanently)
4) Financial losses: My short positions on the stock market weren’t exactly a rose garden either when I experimented with that for a few years around 2015. That was both costly and embarrassing. Most of all, however, it was awake-up call to scrutinize and adjust my strategy for the future. Once again, my natural reaction to losses were to focus on the future and to make an active change.
But, there is no need to dwell on the past, which is the very message in this post. I just wanted to make sure you didn’t mistake me for somebody with all the luck, just because I currently am.
You will lose
Losses are a part of life. Some go as far as saying “without loss and death, life is not worth living”.
In any case, you will experience losses. The question is how you deal with them. Anger, regret, apathy might be both natural and common reactions, but rarely very effective. Optimism, curiosity and positive action seem more productive. And they are.
These are my thoughts on how to mitigate their effects, or even benefit from the losses:
Neutralizing losses
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