When it became known that our films of fifty years ago were gone, I was terribly depressed. Uncle Jack, Aunt Minna, grandfather, my cousins at the summer grill – the whole story of my childhood was irretrievably lost. My wife and I gave that amateur film to a local shop to have it sent to a photo lab to be converted into DVD format. And no one could tell us where this fragile and so dear to me celluloid ended up.
We learned about this loss a day after Flight 3407 crashed a few miles from the town where I was born and raised. And as the scale of the tragedy became clearer, I became ashamed of my experiences. The people from that flight will never again have the opportunity to be upset about the loss of the film.
They will never be able to burn bread in the toaster in the morning, get fired, or go through a tough breakup. All the people who flew on that flight will never experience bitter disappointments, they will no longer have to experience any difficulties. As a psychologist, I help people deal with their emotional problems. But, with the exception of some form of existential therapy, my colleagues and I rarely encourage clients to look at what is happening to them from a different angle. And accept life, including experiences, as an inexpressibly precious gift.
The experience of difficulties and losses is possible only while we are alive – and this can console us
All philosophical and religious traditions were built on this. The Jews have this parable: “When a Jew breaks his leg, he thanks God for not breaking both legs. When he breaks both, he thanks you for not hurting his neck.” In Islam there is an exclamation “Allah is great”: it is pronounced both in moments of joy and sorrow. Thomas of Kempis, a German monk, mystic and writer, said that “experiences and life crises that fall on a person often allow him to find a way to his heart.”
And the Roman philosopher Boethius remarked: “Success leads us astray, adversity teaches us.” I think when we face difficulties, we can find some comfort in the very fact that we are going through this experience just because we are alive. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger believed that the feeling of our mortality allows us to live richly. I think the presence of problems makes it possible to feel more acutely those joyful moments that life gives.
The plane crash made me deeply feel the hard and well-known truth: we are just creatures of flesh and blood. Mortal creatures. That flight deprived fifty people of the luxury of solving life’s problems. All we can do in memory of these people is to live our lives to the fullest, gratefully accepting both adversity and bitterness as part of the vibrant nature of human existence.