There is a moment – and I think most of us have lived it – where life hits you so unexpectedly hard that you just sit there, still, not knowing whether to cry or go numb. A loss, a failure, a situation you never asked for and certainly never deserved. And in that moment, the mind starts asking a very old question: Why me?
I have asked that question more times than I can count.
But over the years, through pain that I would not wish on anyone and through a quiet journey inward, I found something that changed everything – not the bad events themselves, but what I discovered about my reaction to them.
The Part You Can Always Control
If you have read my earlier piece on Free Will vs Destiny, you already know this: some of what happens in our life is not fully in our hands. The events – good and bad – are often the fruits of karma planted across many lifetimes, arriving at their appointed time, whether we are ready or not.
We did not always choose the storm. But we can always choose how we stand in it.
That choice – our reaction – is completely in our hands. It is our free will.
This is not a small thing. This is one of the most powerful things available to a human being.
Bad Events Will Come – That Is Certain
Here is something I had to make peace with: even a person living the most honest, good-hearted life will face painful times. Even when you are doing everything right in this life, old karma has its own schedule. It does not check with you before it arrives.
So waiting for a life without difficulties – that is not the answer.
The answer, I found, is simpler and harder at the same time: accept that the bad time is here, and then decide – consciously decide – how you will face it.
What I Actually Did
I want to be honest here, because this blog is about real experience, not theory.
When some of the worst periods of my life arrived, I did not find peace on my own. The clarity came from somewhere far wiser – from quietly reading the Bhagavad Gita. What Shri Krishna teaches is not just philosophy to be admired from a distance. It is a living guide for exactly these moments – the ones where life feels unbearable and you do not know how to stand back up.
And what I learned, and then slowly began to practice, was something that might sound strange – I started ignoring the weight of the bad event, or sometimes, I simply made fun of it.
Not in a way that was in denial. But in a way that refused to give the difficult time more power than it deserved.
I tried to convert the pain into something lighter – a lesson, a moment I could one day laugh about, a teacher I had not expected. And slowly, that shift in reaction became a shield. The situation did not always change immediately. But I changed. And that made it possible to keep going, to keep doing good work, to not let the bad season define the entire story of my life.
Bad times, I have learned, are perhaps the greatest teacher anyone will ever have. No comfortable moment taught me what a hard one did. The depth of understanding, the empathy, the resilience – these come from the difficult chapters, not the easy ones.
The Person Who Had Everything – But Reacted Sadly
Let me share something I have observed in people around me, and maybe you have seen this too.
There are people in our circles – friends, relatives, colleagues – who, from the outside, seem to have everything. A stable income, a loving family, health, comfort. Everything we may have once prayed for ourselves.
And yet, they are sad. Constantly. Unhappy in the middle of abundance.
Why?
Because they chose to react to their good life with sadness. Not consciously, perhaps. But reaction is always a choice, even when it does not feel like one.
And then there are others who have faced tremendous difficulty – loss, poverty, illness – and yet there is a warmth in their smile that is unmistakable. A groundedness. A joy that does not depend on circumstances.
The outer events were completely different. But the inner reaction is what separated these two lives.
This is what I mean when I say: your reaction is your free will. No karma, no destiny, no external force can take that from you. It is the one thread that is always in your hand.
So What Should You Choose?
Choose to react well. Choose to meet even the worst of times with as much lightness and goodness as you can gather in that moment.
This is not toxic positivity. It is not pretending everything is fine when it is not. It is something far more grounded – it is a quiet, firm decision that your inner state will not be completely surrendered to outer circumstances.
When you react to difficulty with steadiness, a few things begin to happen:
- The bad time loses the ability to destroy your peace completely
- You start seeing the lesson hidden inside the experience
- You stop adding new bad karma through anger, bitterness, or despair
- And slowly, the difficult season passes – because all seasons pass
Lord Shri Krishna’s Answer
The Bhagavad Gita speaks of this directly. A person of steady wisdom is not shaken by sorrow, not swept away by pleasure. Not because they feel nothing – but because they have found something deeper than both.
Surrender to Lord Shri Krishna – not as a passive giving up, but as an active trust that there is a wisdom at work far greater than what we can see in any single painful moment.
When I began to truly practice this – reacting to my bad times with faith rather than fear, with a quiet smile rather than bitterness – I noticed something remarkable: even in my lowest points, there was a thread of joy running underneath everything. Steady. Quiet. Unshakeable.
That is the life Lord Krishna points us toward. Not a life without difficulty. But a life where difficulty no longer has the final word.
A Final Word From My Experience
The bad time will end. I promise you – it always does.
But what you choose to do with yourself inside the bad time – how you speak to yourself, how you treat others, how you hold your own spirit – that shapes not just this chapter, but the karma you are quietly planting for every chapter that follows.
React with goodness. React with faith. Make the difficult season your teacher, not your destroyer.
Choose to be well, even when life is not.
And trust Lord Shri Krishna – in my experience, those who do, always find their way to something that looks, in the end, very much like peace.
