If you’re one of those kids who didn’t get everything you need from your parents—and let’s face it, pretty much everyone is—this is probably something you carry with you. Maybe you’re angry or sad. Wounded or resentful. You wonder what could have been, who you’d be, if they’d been around more…or been more patient…or loving…or understood you.
And while there is no doubt that this experience was tragic, perhaps there is another way of looking at it. We wrote an email over at Daily Dad (please subscribe if you haven’t!) recently which notes Robert F. Kennedy’s troubled childhood in the troubled Kennedy household. His family mourned the loss of his older brother. They put their hopes in his brother John. They fretted about his sister. His father thought that Bobby had little potential, that he wasn’t everything a young Kennedy should be, so the boy, as one Kennedy aide observed, was “overlooked.”
That was unfair. It must have been painful. Yet Kennedy’s biographer, Evan Thomas, would write that this turned out to be a gift, arguing that he “had been saved by neglect.” Because it meant Bobby didn’t have to deal with all the pressure. It let him develop at his own pace. It also allowed him to develop a conscience and an ability to empathize that most of the rest of the family lacked.
When we look at the life of Marcus Aurelius (if you want a biography try Lives of the Stoics or How To Think Like a Roman Emperor), we can see a similar pattern. His early days as a boy were defined by loss. His father, Verus, died when he was just three.
Yet, without being cursed by tragedy Marcus wouldn’t have been as close with his mother, whom he writes so glowingly about in Meditations. We know for certain that without it, he would not have received the great gift that was his adoptive stepfather, Antoninus. Marcus came to see him, Marcus’ biographer Ernest Renan wrote, as “the most beautiful model of a perfect life.” All his adult life, Marcus strived to be a disciple of Antoninus, and as a result, he himself became a beautiful model of a great life. It was also from this tragedy that Marcus got the gift of his stepbrother Lucius Verus, from whom, Marcus would write, his own character was so improved.
What we go through in life, the knocks we take, the losses we experience—they aren’t fun. If we had a choice, we may choose for them not to happen. But still, we have no idea how they are preparing us, shaping us, even saving us. All we can do is try to find meaning, find lessons, find the opportunities in these moments, however tragic and painful they may be in the moment.
