Five and a half years ago, I broke my left foot. At the time, my only sources of income were waiting tables and bartending, and my primary sources of fun were hiking and skiing, so having a broken foot was a big problem. To make matters worse, it didn’t heal very quickly. In fact, it’s still not completely healed. I have persistent pain and inflammation that limit what I can do. And yet, I’m grateful for my foot injury. This big problem gave me an even bigger gift.
I’ve spent the last five and a half years learning to live with this. I’ve had to figure out how to tolerate the pain and inconvenience it causes. I’ve had to develop the patience to let my foot heal at its own pace. I’ve learned to notice and celebrate the small improvements that accrete through time and effort. I found a new career and new ways to have fun. I exchanged the frustration I felt about what I can’t do for gratitude about what I can do. I came to accept my fate and found a sense of inner peace I’d never known before.
But this personal growth is not the gift I speak of, though I am deeply grateful for it. The most important gift this big problem game me was perspective. Dealing with a truly big problem helped me see that most of the other problems in my life were really insignificant. It’s now much easier to accept when minor things don’t go my way. If I can wait half a decade for my foot to heal, surely I can wait half an hour in bad traffic without issue. Because I’m big enough to handle a truly big problem, the small problems in my life have transformed: They used to seem like mountains; now I see them for the molehills they really are.
Well, most of the time anyway. I wish I could say that I always maintain a perfectly Zen, ‘don’t sweat the small stuff’ attitude, but all I can really say is that my tendency to overreact to small setbacks and minor frustrations has diminished greatly, and that I have my broken foot to thank for it.
Before you’ve dealt with a major challenge, a serious setback, a catastrophic failure, or a genuine trauma, you’ll probably complain often about little bad things: minor grievances, annoyances inconveniences, mistakes, mishaps, rudeness, delays, etc. But once you’ve experienced and psychologically overcome a truly big bad thing, those little bad things hardly phase you at all. The gift of big problems is that you stop complaining so much about the little ones.