# Making Friends with the Present: A Life-Changing Shift

- Show: [Stillness in the Storms](https://stillnessinthestorms.com/), a podcast with Steven Webb
- Episode: 95
- Published: 27 July 2023
- Length: 22:29 (about 22 minutes)
- Subject: Inner Peace Foundations
- Web page: https://stillnessinthestorms.com/episode/making-friends-with-the-present-a-life-changing-shift
- Listen: [Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/making-friends-with-the-present-a-life-changing-shift/id1467889656?i=1000622533270), [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/show/5Q4LN7Ev2CwTMzxj8jlFmN), [MP3](https://podcasts.captivate.fm/media/454881a0-6f6b-46a0-962e-671d3e27dc42/Making-Friends-with-the-Present-A-Life-Changing-Shift-Stillness.mp3)

Do you actually know that the worst thing that happened to you was bad? You never know what worse luck your bad luck saved you from.

At 10:31pm I dived in, hit the bottom of the pool and broke my neck. People tell me what my life would have been. A family, a job, the lot. They do not know. Nor do I. When Edison's lab burned down his son found him watching it, and the legend says he was glad, because all his mistakes had burned up with it. Maybe the traffic jam is the reason you are not the accident. You do not know. That is not a consolation prize, that is the actual truth.

**One thing to try:** Take the hardest thing you have been through and list what it gave you. Strength counts.

## In this episode

- (3:12) 10:31pm, the pool, and the sound of it
- (4:04) What people think my life would have been
- (5:28) Some days it is just the carer running late
- (6:34) The child who wanted the green one
- (7:31) Maybe you were not in the traffic jam. Maybe you were the traffic jam
- (10:12) Edison's lab on fire
- (11:30) All our mistakes burned up. We can start again
- (16:48) Coming up the hill and feeling the cold on my face
- (20:15) List the gifts. Then tell me what you got

Support the podcast and join the Weekly Calm: [stevenwebb.uk](https://stevenwebb.uk)

Thank you for listening.

Steven

## The question this answers

How do you know the thing that went wrong was actually the worse option?

> You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.

Cormac McCarthy

That line does most of the work in this episode. I keep coming back to it and I had never given it a whole episode before.

## The heart of it

- You cannot change this moment. You can only change something now that shapes the next one.
- The alternative you are grieving is one you have never seen and cannot judge.
- There is usually a gift in it. It is rarely visible on the day.

People tell me what my life would have been if I had not broken my neck. A family, a good job, the lot, because I am motivated and I would have done well. And I say, maybe. I was eighteen, I had passed my test nine months earlier, and I drove like I was invincible. I could just as easily have killed somebody.

I do not say that to make the wheelchair sound lucky. I say it because they are certain about a life nobody has ever seen, and so are you about yours.

Stoicism gets misread here too. People think it means gritting your teeth and staying in control. It means the opposite. You are not in control of nearly anything, including your next thought, and that turns out to be all right.

There is a story I love about it. In 1914 Edison's laboratory burned down, and most of his work with it. His son found him watching it, and rather than despairing he sent the boy to fetch his mother, because she would never see anything like it again.

> There is great value in disaster. All our mistakes are burned up. Thank God we can start anew.

Thomas Edison

The advice I could have used, lying in that bed at eighteen, is one nobody would have dared give me. So what. You are paralysed. What are you going to do with it? I would have wanted to knock them out. It would still have been the right question.

And I know the gift is real because I have had it late every time. When Bees Knees Computers went under I was down to under eight stone, lying to my parents about eating at the shop and to my carers about eating at home. The taxman ringing to say I had to shut the doors was the kindest thing that happened that year, and it took me a decade to see it.

## One small thing to try

Take the hardest thing you have been through, the one you are already on the other side of, and write down what it gave you.

Strength counts. A different view of people counts. Then notice how long it took you to be able to see any of it, and give the current thing the same patience.

## Questions people ask

### Is this saying bad things happen for a reason?

No. I would never hand anybody a hard life on purpose and I do not think anything arranged mine. What I am saying is narrower. You cannot judge the road you did not take, so the certainty that it was better is not knowledge.

### What if I cannot find the gift in what is happening now?

Then you are normal, and you are probably too close to it. Most of mine took weeks and some took years. The trick is not finding it faster, it is knowing from experience that one usually turns up.

### Is this the same as being positive about everything?

No. It hurts, it is awful, and I say so in the episode. Making friends with the present moment is not enjoying it. It is stopping the fight with the one thing that was never up for negotiation.

## Transcript

[0:05] Welcome to Stillness in the Storms. I'm Steven Webb, your host. And one of my quotes that I always go back to and I absolutely love, and this is going to be the subject of this week's podcast, is you never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from. You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from. Cormac McCarthy. No country for old men. So this week's podcast is about making friends with the present moment. A life-changing shift and when you really grasp this concept, it really does make a difference in your life and I know I say that all the time. When you get this, it makes a difference but... When we get these little things and when we progress and when we, I don't know, grow up consciously and we have a deeper understanding and all that, when we get these things, we just suffer a little less and we stop fighting life for a little bit more. So just before we move on to the whole subject of today's podcast, I want to invite you to, if you don't get my weekly calm newsletter, please head over to StevenWebb.uk and start receiving it.

[1:18] I send one out every Friday. I say that with a massive amount of confidence like I do every Friday. Last week was the very first one and tomorrow will be the second one. And I'm really, I'm quite excited about this. I'm always wondering what to send out in a newsletter but it's a bit about my personal life, what I'm up to and it's about just different things, what book I'm reading, what videos I've watched on Youtube. Also about my latest podcast, different things and just hints and tips and just behind the scenes of what gives you a little more inner peace in life. And I want to say thank you to anybody that donates and supports the show um You can head over to, again, StevenWebb.uk and there's a link there as well. So there's a link to all kinds of things on that page, StevenWebb.uk where you can treat me to a coffee which really helps because the show is getting more expensive hosting to be quite honest and editing and such like. And you can also find a link to Inner Peace Meditations. But anyway, let's get on with the show. Enough about all those things. I'll remind you at the end so you don't have to worry about it. So the concept of this is making friends with the present moment is it's embracing the present moment. You cannot do anything about the present moment, yet we spend our life trying to change the present moment. And I very often end up in a conversation with people all the time about what my life would have been like if I wasn't paralysed. So at 18 years old, September the 1st 10 31 at night, I know because when I walked along the top of the wall just before I dived in the swimming pool and ended up paralysed, I looked at my watch and I remember looking at my watch and I can say 10 31 With confidence because it was one of those old digital watches with a black Lcd display 10 31 pm and I dived in and I hit the bottom of the pool and I broke my neck. And boy did it hurt. It really

[3:29] hurt. In actual fact, I now think I hit the edge of the pool, not the bottom. I think that's why it hurt so much. But I broke my neck. I ended up paralysed from my neck down. And here I am over 30 years later, still paralysed, still sat on my butt all day um And it just changed my life. But very often I get in this conversation with people and they say, do you know I really imagine if you hadn't ended up paralysed, you'd have had a really good life. And I'm like, okay. So I haven't got a good life now. And they're like, well, you know, you kind of know what I mean. I'm like, yeah, I do know what you mean. So, and then I'd say, well, what do you think would have happened to my life if I hadn't broke my neck? And they'll come back with, well, I think you would have been you'd have had a family and you'd have had a job. You would have done really well because you're quite positive and you're quite motivated. I think you'd have been really, really successful and all that. And I'm like, yeah, but I might not have been. I might have ended up doing, you know, I don't know. At the time I was 18 years old, I was driving a car like I was invincible and I wasn't the best driver. I'd only just passed my test, what, eight, nine months before. And I would drive it around like as if I knew how to drive. I'd been driving for years and I was breaking the speed of it.

[4:48] So I was a typical teenager and I thought nothing would ever happen to me. And I could have easily, if I hadn't broke my neck, what happens if I'd run over somebody? What happens if I killed myself? What happens if I killed somebody else even worse? You know, I don't know that the alternative... Was necessarily better than life I've got. And I think that's really important when we get stuck in traffic jams or when something goes wrong. How do you know the alternative to your current situation is better or worse? And I talk about this quite often, but I don't normally do a whole podcast on it. And this is what I want to do a whole podcast. So I want to share a couple of other stories. But, you know, very often my life takes a turn for the worst I The carer might be late in the morning or I'm lying on the bed and my body just doesn't want to play ball and I'm late for something. And we often see it as, well, if I wasn't late, things would have worked out. Or if I, when I asked that person out. If they'd said yes, I'd have been happy. Or if they hadn't cheated on me, we would have lived happily ever after. The point is you don't know. How do you know this moment isn't the best alternative? You don't. There is no alternative. You only have the current moment.

[6:11] Like Eckhart Tolle says, the power of now. Now is the only option you have. You know, when a thought comes into your head that the thought's there. You can't change it. You can decide what to do with it. It's like when you present your child, you come home from shopping and you go up to your child, young child, and go, oh, here, I bought you a t-shirt. And they look at it and go, I want a green one. And you're like, they didn't have any green ones. And you go, well, I just want a green one. Well, you don't. The child says, I just want a green one. And you end up in an argument and all that. And the child doesn't understand the power of now and you cannot change it. And you're explaining the whole structure of the shops closed they didn't have any more and they could have run out. And we end up in this situation where we think we can change the present moment. We think there's some kind of alternatives that if this hadn't happened something else would have been better or we kind of get the concept it's not going to be always better but we do think if things are going wrong the alternative is um Just somehow better than what it is. And that's where that quote from Cormac McCarthy comes from. You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from. And that's just boom! How powerful is that? You know, maybe if you weren't stuck in that traffic jam, you might be the one causing the traffic jam, I.e. the one in the accident. The point is you don't know. And you don't know whether the alternative could be a lot worse. So when you make friends with the current moment, when you make friends with the things that cause things to go wrong and we have this illusion that we're in control. Like we're in control of what actually happens to us and we're not. We go out and get in the car, we're somehow control in control of the car to some degree but we're at the mercy of all the different things on the car. We're at the mercy of traffic, how everybody else is driving. You know, we're at the mercy of our subconscious mind, with the mercy of how our

[8:23] body's feeling, how everybody else is feeling, the biorhythms of everybody around us. We're at the mercy of the economic structure of the country and things like that. It gets a bit tiring, doesn't it? You know, we're really not in control of very much at all. And this is where Stoicism comes in. People think Stoicism is about... Wanting to be in control of everything. And you have that stiff upper lip. It's like, yeah, I'm in control. No, stoicism is realising that you're not in control of virtually everything. And it's okay. You're not even in control of how your feelings what feelings come up. You're not in control of what you think. If you think you are, you tell me what your next thought is. You don't know. You're not in control of your next thought. You're not in control of what comes up. It's really, really interesting. And if we reframe our life like this and we just look at every present moment as, ah, this is here for me. Can I find the gift in the present moment? Can I find the gift in whatever's coming up?

[9:31] Even if it's really, really difficult. Even if it sucks. Can I find a gift in it somewhere? And very often a few weeks later we can find a gift, but it's really difficult to find it quicker and earlier in that moment. And I love the story of Thomas Edison. And everybody knows the story of the all the light bulbs going wrong and the 99 light bulbs didn't work or something like that. You know, 99 fails. But in December 1914, Thomas Edison's west um In West Orange, New Jersey. His laboratory was heavily damaged in a fire. And this facility was not only his lab but also his manufacturing site for his whole company. And a lot of his work was destroyed in the fire. And the legend goes that at the height of the fire... Edison's 24 year old son Charles, frantically searched for his father among the smoke and the debris. He finally found him calmly watching the scene, his face glowing of reflection, his white hair blowing in the wind, and my heart ached for him, said Charles. He was 67, no longer a young man, and everything was going up in flames. When he saw me, he shouted, Charles, where's your mother? And when I told him, I don't know, he said, find her. Bring her here. She will never see anything like this as long as she lives.

[11:08] So he was fascinated by this big fire that was like going off in front of him. Yeah, he was losing everything. And the next morning edison looked up at the ruins and said, there is great value in disaster. All our mistakes are burned up. Thank God we can start anew. And I just love that. All our mistakes are burned up. Thank God we can start in you And I think when I look at my life and all that, it's like, I didn't die. When I was lying there on the bed, I often say, what were the best bit of advice I could have ever got when I was lying in bed paralysed for the first six months of my after my accident? I was 18 years old. And if someone had come over to me and stood there, and they leant over and they said, Steven. I said, what? And they just said, so what? You're paralysed.

[12:11] What are you going to do with it? A, I'd have felt like, I think been quite angry and knocking them out or something, being honest. But that would have been the best advice because when something does happen, when things do go wrong the The best question is, what can I do with it? This is my friend. This is here to help me. It's here to teach me something. It's here to change my direction. It's here to give me something. And just that whole feeling of this is my friend. It's here for me. I think changes everything. And that's where that quote comes in. You know, what worse luck could have happened? Okay, I've butchered the quote now, but you know what I mean. Edison's resilience is often used as a motivational tell rather than viewing the fire as a devastating setback and I've just used it in the same way. And I totally agree. And there's loads and loads of stories of these um If I look up a couple now, you know inky Johnson a promising football player from the University of Tennessee inky was predicted to be a top pick in the 2006 Nfl Draft. However, during one game, a severe injury permanently pluralized his right arm. His football career was over. But Inky didn't let this setback define him. Instead, he went back to school, earned a master's degree in sports and psychology and become an inspirational speaker. He's now well known for his motivational speeches and he's impacted many people around the world. And there's loads of stories like this. And I've got personal stories of friends. I've got Tessa, a friend of mine in the States when she was it's about 20 years ago now. I'm sure it was in September as well. But they went and done a operation on her.

[14:18] And they put in, I think it's a shunt or something in a um in a head that helps to drain off excess fluid. And I'm gonna get a story slightly wrong, but I'm sure you'll understand what I mean that but they they caught a vessel or they caught something. So she she went to sleep completely. Able-bodied. And she woke up and she's paralysed down one side. And imagine that um You know, you can't imagine that you You go to sleep for one thing and you wake up with something completely different that's above and beyond. And she's had children and she does so much. And she's she's turned that travesty into um she's now taken sign language courses. She's gone back to work. She's done so much of her life. You know, I love test a bit She's amazing what she does and all that with her life. And I've got another friend that is very, very close to me that's done so much with their life and they've turned. What happened to them as children into a strength and resilience and they're so much tougher because of it. And when I sit down and talk to people and when they tell me about the difficulties they've been through in life, very often I wouldn't ever choose. I wouldn't say, well, okay, let's let's give a person a really tough life. But very often these people that have had a really hard time find strength. They find comfort and nourishment in the fact that they're able to build back better from it. And I think it's really powerful when we close the gap between not liking the current situation and finding that there's a gift in it, that there's something we can do with it. And I like to think there's a gift in everything. And we just

[16:31] gotta dig a little deeper to find it. And where's the gift in me being paralysed? Well, it slows me down a little bit. It's, you know, it's given me a beautiful view on life. I often sit here and find myself looking out the window daydreaming. And in a wonderful moment, I'm like, holy crap, I'm alive? I can see. I can see in colours. I can feel. I can do all these things I was coming up the hill the other day in my electric wheelchair and I could feel the coldness. Of the breeze on my face as I was driving up the hill. And then I come out into the sunlight and I could feel the sun on my face. I was like, how amazing is this? I'm just a collection of atoms. The satin electric chair that's driving up the hill. That's feeling the sun on my face and I'm aware of it. And I'm enjoying it.

[17:29] You know, if that's not magic, what is? You know, the magic and the miracles are all around us. We just got to stop and take that breath. And I think when things really go wrong in life and they really spin us out, you know, that curveball on a 4 p.m. Tuesday afternoon, whether it's something minor like a traffic jam or something major like your whole company burning down. You know, when I when I lost Bees Knees Computers in 2001, 2002. Myself and Richard Johns. He's passed away now. I went to his funeral just about three months ago, and we started a computer a firm together, and we traded for about three years. And after three years, Pc World come to true just about 10 miles down the road from the shop. And of course, I blamed it on Pc World, but it wasn't. It was the fact that we didn't adapt and change. We didn't embrace the internet in the way we should have done. But, you know, I was younger then. You blame everybody else. But at that point I I lost about two stone. I lost the business. And the greatest gift I had was when the tax man phoned me and said, you have to close the door. You cannot negatively trade if you're a limited company or something like that. It's 20 years ago now. And what a gift that was telling me that I had to close the door um You know, it freed me. Instead of going out there and not being able to eat and worrying. I was lying to everybody. I would tell my parents that I would eat at the shop and I would tell my carers that I was eating at home and you know, I was lying to everybody but I couldn't face anything. I'm six foot tall and I went down to about just under eight stone. You could see every rib. And even in that time now when I look back and I didn't see at the time, what gift that gave me. You know, that rock bottom at that point

[19:41] gave me a deeper insight into life and I appreciated life a lot more. At that time I got together with Emma and moved and she moved in with her daughter Kember. That didn't work out about 10 years later but that's okay. That gave me something else. So each step where it goes badly wrong gives me another gift in some way. Do I like it? No, it's painful. It's awful. It bloody hurts. But you know, there's always a gift there somewhere. You know, so have a look at your life. Have a look at what you're going through at the moment or what you've been through. And if you can list the gifts that it's given you, whether it was just inner strength, whether it was a gift to have been able to see from a different perspective. You know, just what did it feel like to have that extra gift, that extra depth of view because of what happened? And then move that ability to see when things go really, or that ability to see that it's a gift when you move that closer and closer and closer to the point where this present moment is always a gift. No matter what, you can't change it. Right now, this present moment is what it is. You cannot change it. You can change things right now to govern the next moment, but you cannot change this present moment. You're not in control of it. You know, it's already happened. The moment you're aware of it, it's already happened. And I think that's really important. So there's my podcast and My reflective question for you this week is... What moment in your life did you think there was no gift or there was nothing you could get by or you couldn't get beyond when later on you looked it and it really was a gift? What did you get from it? Then you can contact me. If you go to StevenWebb.uk um contact me. You can treat me to a coffee. Sign up for my weekly calm newsletter that's going out tomorrow um I just want to say that I

[21:55] love you. Thank you. Thank you for being there. Thank you for all the reviews on the podcast. If you haven't left a review recently, please do so. You're awesome and take care. Find the gift in everything. Just sometimes you gotta dig a little deeper. I love you.

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