Crises are inevitable. Some pass quickly and leave little behind, others divide life into a before and an after. They arrive in different forms — illness, loss, betrayal, financial collapse, legal trouble, heartbreak — and no amount of planning exempts anyone from them.
At a societal level, we organise ourselves around this fact. Laws, institutions, healthcare systems, and social support networks all exist to reduce suffering where possible and to respond when prevention fails. But I have increasingly come to think that something similar is required of us individually. A robust psychological and philosophical life must involve preparing, in some measure, to absorb deep suffering: learning how to endure it, how to respond to it, and how not to be entirely undone when it arrives.
In the Phaedo, Socrates says that philosophers are engaged in a lifelong practice of dying. If we take dying to be the end (at the very least) of our material entanglement and limitations, then such engagement would put in perspective what matters beyond the trivial. Taken broadly, this points toward something essential. Crises confront us with limits — limits to control, certainty, permanence, and self-image. They strip away assumptions about how life is supposed to unfold and reveal, often abruptly, the fragility beneath ordinary stability.
In this sense, every crisis is also a kind of existential training ground. Over the years, I have experienced crises of various kinds: medical emergencies, bereavement, financial hardship, heartbreaks, Kafkaesque absurdities. One of the factors that most strongly shaped my response to each was the question of preventability: whether the situation emerged partly through my own failures, or whether it genuinely lay outside my control.
When my own negligence or lack of foresight played a role, the immediate reaction was usually self-reproach. Painful as this can be, I have come to see that response as potentially useful, provided it does not harden into endless rumination. There is a form of suffering that clarifies. It sharpens ethical attention. It reminds us that actions matter, that carelessness accumulates consequences, and that some mistakes are best honoured by making them less likely to repeat.
But crises that are genuinely unavoidable produce a different psychological movement altogether. In those moments, my attention tends to narrow instinctively toward immediacy. Long-term thinking recedes. The mind stops trying to solve life as a whole and focuses instead on what can actually be done now.
Again and again, I have found this narrowing of horizon to be stabilising. It resembles climbing in difficult terrain. Looking too far ahead can become paralysing; looking too far down can induce panic. But if attention remains with the next few footholds, movement becomes possible again. Perhaps not easy and hardly graceful, yet possible. And often that is all it takes to carry on.
This shift — from abstraction to immediacy, from totality to the next necessary action — has been one of the most reliable anchors I know in periods of crisis.
Many of the most difficult periods in my life I have largely had to face alone. I’m an only child, I’ve lived most of my adult life alone and abroad, so there have been years-long stretches where practical and emotional burdens had to be metabolised privately. This has been a blessing albeit sometimes dressed in loneliness. In some ways we are always alone in the interiority of our lives. Yet I have never been truly without support. My parents, while they were alive, remained deeply present in my life. Friendships have endured space and time. And over the past decade, my beloved wife has brought an end to solitary life.
But as invaluable and crucial external support can be, some of the most durable forms of resilience I have found have been internal, developed gradually over years through reading, reflection, writing, meditation, and a sustained engagement with philosophy and psychology.
With time, certain ideas cease to be merely interesting and become structural. They begin to shape perception itself. They provide language for experiences that otherwise feel chaotic and incommunicable. In moments of uncertainty, this inner framework functions like scaffolding: something load-bearing when the ordinary architecture of life begins to shake.
This, to me, is philosophy at its most meaningful: not abstract speculation removed from reality, but thought rendered alive. It is an embodied way of keeping course toward what truly matters amid storms of chaos and uncertainty. Every major crisis I can remember has altered me in some way. I would not simplistically call this growth: some experiences wound more than enlighten; some losses remain losses. But crises do tend to strip away illusions and wounds become signs of a life lived.
Traumatic events destabilise the familiar structure of reality. They dismantle assumptions, interrupt momentum, and expose how contingent much of life truly is. Yet within that disorientation, something can also become unusually clear. Attention sharpens. Priorities reorganise themselves without effort. Much of what ordinarily consumes mental energy suddenly appears trivial, while what genuinely matters emerges with almost exhilarating precision.
Crisis distils. It reduces life, temporarily, to essentials.
This does not make it desirable. I would not willingly relive any of the more painful periods of my life. And yet I also notice that I never wish they didn’t happen. Certain forms of depth, discernment, and gratitude seem impossible to arrive at without encountering fragility directly.
Of course, if I could revisit the past, there are things I would do differently. I would try to notice earlier what required attention. I would avoid some preventable mistakes. I would act sooner where hesitation proved costly. But dwelling excessively on alternative timelines is counterproductive. The mind can spend years negotiating with ‘could’ve been’ realities that never existed. Counterfactuals are, for all intents and purposes, hindsight illusions.
Perhaps the significant possibility contained in crises is developing a sensible relationship to them. It isn’t about trying to prevent or argue with them, or becoming less vulnerable, but perhaps to engage them as a necessary given. And when they come, as they inevitably will, the task is hardly to solve everything at once. It is simply to find the next few footholds, shift your weight, and carry on.