On Dealing With Tragedy

According to dictionary.reference.com : Tragedy - a lamentable, dreadful, or fatal event or affair; calamity; disaster: the tragedy of war.

I had a recent situation with this web server. The database server was locked up and refusing any connections. I do not know why this was happening and the reason it rose to the level of Tragic, is that I planned to launch a commercial venture on the server and having it lock up for unknown reason dashed this dream. The loss of a valued dream is very tragic if the dream is your own.

I had to stop at the time and think “This will one day pass. In the future you will be happy again”. At the time this is a thought that is hard to believe. I could only know this truth intellectually. If my dream is truly gone. If I am never able to figure out why the server keeps crashing (I can’t launch the commercial venture if I don’t know what is wrong with the server. Paying customers would be very angry if the server keeps going down).

“This is so unfair, why is this happening to me?”. I will never get over this unfair situation. My dreams of financial success ruined by a stupid temperamental server.

Now in this case, when I rebooted the server I saw that the virus scanning program had several locked running instances. This was most likely the cause. However, for that brief period I felt I was able to understand HOW a person can get caught up and find themselves unable to move past a tragedy.

For example, having a child die has to be in the top “Tragedies you can never get over”. However, people who have a child die do laugh again. Life does go on. You actually have to “re-feel” the hurt to bring it back. Why would a person do this? Perhaps it is that we feel we were wronged. Until this is made right we will hold on to it. My child should have never been taken from me. However, my child can never come back so this right will never be wronged.

The only way to move forward is forgiveness. We can forgive anyone for anything. It IS in our power. If we are in enough pain we will be motivated to forgive. Perhaps this is what happens when we let time pass. Either we forget the pain and get tired of re-feeling it”. Or we eventually forgive.