Crisis = Danger+Opportunity ???

Recently I was listening to someone speak about the Chinese characters for crisis being danger and opportunity. In the context of the discussion was about good that can be found even in the worse situations. Very Taoist I thought.

I was going to write a post completely on that topic and how often kernels of good come from a bad occurrence but decided to do a little more research first. I was dismayed to find several articles written by authoritative sources that present this theory as an almost urban myth. One PhD in Chinese linguistics described that the characters actually are “danger and incipient moment; a crucial point (when something begins or changes)” and that making “incipient moment into opportunity is a significant misinterpretation.” Another scholar,in addition to parsing out the characters and their actual meaning, thinks that the perpetuation of this myth is Pollyannaish and dangerous in itself. There seems to be an almost market of sorts for items with this theme of finding opportunity in crisis. Here is one source of the commentary. http://www.pinyin.info/chinese/crisis.html

So at first I scrapped the idea of writing on this but as I mused further I was intrigued not by the clinging to of something that is completely false. I think humans do that very often in varying situations with an attitude of don’t confuse me with the facts and don’t mess with my fantasies.

I don’t think here it is clinging for the sake of clinging but rather a core optimism that is part of the human spirit. The desire to see order in things; to see good surpass evil; to see all things end well; to see that happy ending.

After coming through a crisis, with its fear and sometimes despair, and sometimes heap of a mess, either physically or emotionally, we innately want some good to come from this terror. That all the error and pain endured and energy expended has some gain to it.

I know myself I have tried hard to identify and in a way honor valuable lessons and useful tools that have come from the process of working through and coming back from a job loss or health issue. I don’t think that there is anything naïve in that and I am not glossing over the crisis as having been valuable in itself. No thanks, I‘ll learn the lesson another way if you please. But it is a way of recentering and reconciling with the bad that has occurred. That even in a mess and a disaster we are able to comb something positive out of the wreckage to keep us moving forward.

Optimism, yes. Blind optimism, absolutely not.