"This Too Shall Pass" And Other Advice We've Completely Misunderstood

Or, why you shouldn't live your life by other people's mistakes

Where I’d like to be right now, but I’m not. Photo by Alexandre Chambon on Unsplash

I have a post sitting in my drafts all about my recent experience of moving house. Apparently moving house is one of the most stressful things you go through, up there with getting married, getting divorced and bereavement. I haven’t been through any of those so I can’t compare it but I can say that the last few weeks - packing, storing, removing, unpacking - have not been fun. In fact, I’ve written nearly 1500 words on how not fun they are, how much I’m regretting my decision and how desperate I am to go back to London.

I haven’t published them partly because nobody wants to hear someone whine about their terrible misfortune of having to live in beautiful countryside in a picture-perfect (albeit barely functioning) cottage. I also haven’t published it because I woke up this morning and realised that while I’d been panicking about how I was going to survive this massive mistake, I’d forgotten to live by my own good advice. I’d forgotten that this too shall pass.

When I say “this too shall pass” I don’t mean it in the way it’s so often used, as a gentle but pointless reminder that things will get better. In that context it is worse than useless. Nobody wants to be told that the sadness, grief or fear they’re experiencing right now is just a fleeting emotion, worthy of no more credence than a love poem written on a toilet door. Mainly because so often those terrible sadnesses don’t pass. They bury themselves in our bones, worming their way into our souls until they are simply a part of us, eventually hidden from sight by moments of joy that bloom on top of them. Gone but not forgotten.

We have misinterpreted “this too shall pass” as an order to cheer up, when in fact it is a reminder to be present. What “this too shall pass” really means is that you have a choice. You can stay in the story of where you are now or you can open your eyes and look around you at what is really here. In my case, I could stay in the story of having made a huge mistake and wanting to run back to safety in London, or I could open my eyes and really take in what was around me. I could look out of the window and see… my dog taking a huge poo in the middle of our newly acquired garden.

Yes, I know, that wasn’t the inspiring moment you were hoping for. Me neither.

But in that moment it made me laugh. There I was, standing in the kitchen, looking out at the sun desperately trying to peek through the clouds, thinking deep thoughts about how “this too shall pass”, and right in front of me was my dog bringing me straight back down to earth. Reminding me to laugh at myself and, as she did her customary post-poo sprint of celebration across the garden, to laugh at her.

That’s what I think is meant by “this too shall pass”, it’s not about staying hopeful but rather a firm reminder that if you don’t pay attention in the moment, you miss the things that bring you joy. It’s a way of saying, “hey, wake up! Get out of your head and get into the world! Because it’s going, going, gone. And you don’t want to miss this! Move!”. And in that moment, that was what I needed to hear.

It’s made me think about other “good advice” that we’ve misinterpreted. At the top of my list I have “love your body”, “give it your all”, and “just be more confident”. There are probably hundreds more that will come to me during the day, and if you’ve got your own add them to the comments. For me, it’s not that this advice is wrong so much that it’s got lost in translation.

For example, “love your body” is a great aim. Feeling intense affection and deep regard for our bodies feels like a good goal. But where we’ve mistranslated it is that we’ve forgotten we’re also allowed to feel anything else about our bodies. “Love your body” in its current meaning, allows no space for curiosity about your body, or fear of it, or disappointment in it. There is no space for change or frustration about our bodies because we have to be so deeply in love with them. The “love” is this advice is the sort of childish devotion we have to a popstar, where we think they can do no wrong. And we all know how that turns out! How I think it should be interpreted is rather about honouring your body. That’s to say, respecting it, being proud of it and also being honest with it. Rather than having to pretend everything’s fine all the time we can hold the contradictory feelings of wanting something to be different and still appreciating it for what it is.

“Give it your all!” is another phrase which fills me with dread. As a woman who has never felt more seen than when Hannah Gadsby said she identified “as tired”, the thought of giving anything my all feels overwhelming. I have so little to give, the voice inside my head replies, and you want me to give all of it? Every last piece till there is nothing left for me? What “give it your all” implies is that you keep going until you drop down dead. A better expression, for me, would be,

“give it your all for one minute and then have a rest.”

I can do pretty much anything for one minute. Some things I can give my all to for five minutes in fact. And occasionally, I can give something my all for a whole hour. But after all of these “giving it my all” moments, I then need to rest. I believe this is true for everyone.

I was recently listening to a podcast (by the artist formally known as, Spencer from Made in Chelsea) where two men talked about completing an ultra-marathon through the jungle. Both of them talked about how they’d had moments where they’d felt like they were gliding through it and moments where they had, literally, been crawling through mud. What struck me though was what one of them said about pacing himself. Rather than pushing through for the entire marathon, he’d taken it in short bursts, sometimes for no more than five minutes. At the start of each of these bursts he’d asked himself, what does my body need here? To push on or to take it slow? To rest or to strive? It turns out that even ultra-marathon runners can only “give it their all” for part of the time, they too need to rest.

And finally, the most misinterpreted piece of advice, in my opinion, is, “just be more confident.” When I trained as a coach, we were taught to see action as made up of two processes: there were things we needed to do and ways we needed to be. For example, if you wanted to get a promotion at work you might need to take on a big ticket project or set up a meeting with your boss to discuss your future. These would be examples of doing things. But you’d also need to be some things. You might want to be; hopeful about the outcome, kind to yourself if you felt nervous, determined to ask no matter what the response was.

The problem with confidence is that we’ve put it in the being column, when really it belongs in the doing column. We tell people to “be more confident” but if you don’t feel confident in something, you don’t feel confident in it. Not feeling confident is what stops people taking steps forward. Instead we need to “do more confident”, that is we need to ask ourselves “what would I do if I felt completely confident in this?” and then do that thing. We’ll probably have to accept in the doing of the thing that we feel terrified, we might have to modify the thing to a point where we feel it’s possible for us to do, and pulling in some help to get it done is almost certainly going to be required. But we won’t at any point have to “be more confident”, that will come after we’ve done the thing and have some proof as to our ability or some knowledge as to what else we need to learn first. So the next time someone encourages you to just “be more confident”, first of all refer them to this article and then ask yourself, “if I let go of being more confident, how could I do more confident here instead?”

What is the advice you’d like to rewrite and why? Tell me in the comments.

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