Situation Is Situation

On being with what is, as it is

A few years ago, my wife, kids, and I were visiting my in-laws in the UK. My wife and I were sitting in their living room, having a (twentieth? thirtieth?) cup of tea. The kettle never gets cold in that house. 

My father-in-law, Malcolm, read out a text from his phone. An acquaintance of theirs had suffered a stroke the night before. My mother-in-law, known to everyone as Muz, said, “Oh dear,” then was quiet for a while. 

Muz then said, “We’ve certainly been lucky on the health front, haven’t we?”

We all looked at her, a little baffled. 

“Except for the cancer!” Malcolm said, then cracked up. 

It’s true: Muz completely forgot she’d had colon cancer, six years earlier. She’d undergone surgery, then eight weeks of chemo. She was now in the clear, thankfully, but honestly, the moment the surgery was over, she spoke of cancer in the past tense. Anyone who made a fuss over her, she waved them off like a fly. 

Muz grew up on a farm in the north of England, a place where, as she tells it, “You just got on with things.” I’ve never seen anyone just get on with things like she does.

Even before she just got on with having cancer, it was clear: She felt like her getting cancer was just a normal, everyday thing that happens to a person.

Which, of course, it is—but most of us, almost any of us, would feel at least a little sense of having been served up some very bad luck.

Grief researcher Lucy Hone says, “We seem to live in an age where we’re entitled to a perfect life, where shiny, happy photos on Instagram are the norm, when actually, the very opposite is true.”

It’s the mistaken impression that our woes are abnormal—that we’ve been singled out—that compounds our suffering by adding a sense of isolation and unfairness.

Long before cancer, Muz’s constant refrain was: “It is what it is—that’s what I always say.” She really does always say this—like, multiple times a day. And everything really is what it is, much as it often seems to us like it shouldn’t be. Embodying this, Muz is one of the least emotionally troubled people I’ve ever met.

In my meditation teacher training, my teacher shared a very similar quote from his teacher, Babaji: “Situation is situation.” I shared this with Muz, and she loved it, and started repeating it—nonstop, of course.

After a few weeks, Muz seemed to have decided that she’d come up with this phrase herself, which she now repeats as, “The situation is the situation.” It’s fine, of course. As far as I’m concerned, anyone who forgot they had cancer can claim whatever phrase they want.

It is what it is, Situation is situation: These aren’t phrases we should ever direct toward others’ challenges, though. It’s something we find our way to on our own. 

I initially misunderstood Situation is situation as having a tinge of, basically: Deal with it. I noticed, sometimes when caught in overwhelming grief, the tendency to push myself toward “better” dealing, toward getting on with things. But that wasn’t my situation. I was “arguing with reality,” as the meditation teacher Adyashanti calls it.

We all get on with things at our own pace. My present situation might well be that I’m not up to facing my grief today. That’s the situation to come to terms with, gently, with self-compassion.

A friend of mine shared over dinner the other night that she was on the subway in NYC, feeling on the verge of breaking down in public. Her brother was in the hospital with a life-threatening illness. She scanned the faces of the commuters, some slumped against the window, some with their heads bowed, grabbing a few moments of sleep. She felt this moment of great tenderness for them, knowing many of them were carrying so much, too.

Self-compassion and empathy increase in tandem. We see others’ suffering, or even just wonder what they might secretly be facing, and we feel more compassion for them and ourselves. We see how much we all need each other.

When I was grieving most deeply, Muz was reaching out, constantly. Endearingly, she wasn’t sure how to message me directly on WhatsApp, so she started a group chat called “Rob,” which was just me and her. Every few days, she’d send me a little note, saying she knows how hard it is, and she was just wanting to check in.

I knew that, along with facing cancer, Muz had lost her own parents, as well as two sisters. What I didn’t know, what I never could’ve expected in the early years of negotiating the usual mother-in-law/son-in-law sitcom-style misunderstandings, was that she would end up becoming one of my most important teachers.

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