You Can Get Used to Anything

Because it's human nature. Like a frog put into water whose temperature rises slowly, we don't notice that things are getting worse, and we find ourselves getting used to hard things too.

The sentence describes the choice to act and to try, even at the price of failing, instead of leaving your dreams shut in a drawer without ever making them real. Gili points out that a lot of people hold on to dreams: writing, poetry, making something. They never bring them out into the light, out of fear and out of that feeling of "who am I anyway," and she would rather see everyone dare to act even at the risk of failing.

Tal tells about her 13-year-old daughter, who is afraid to move up to the advanced surfing group and avoids tests because she's afraid of failing. The answer Tal gave her was to agree in advance not to be the best: to get a low grade, to fall off the board, and to join the strong group anyway, so that the experience itself stops being frightening.

This is a Jewish idea: when I go through something hard, it develops real empathy in me, so that I can understand other people who are going through something similar. The example given is a Krav Maga instructor who was attacked and froze, and learned to use that to teach women who had been sexually assaulted, with a depth of understanding you can't acquire without living it yourself.

Because most things we only grasp with the perspective of time and distance. In the moment a crisis hits it's hard to understand right away why it's good for us, and that is exactly what hindsight is. So it's worth insisting on looking for the good even when you can't see it right away, because usually the meaning only becomes clear later.

Gili explains that if you stop and deal with the problem while it's still small, you never get to the big crisis. It's something she says in sessions about choosing to face difficulties while they're still early and small, so they don't pile up and turn into much bigger suffering later on.