How to Stop the Second Arrow

The Dutchman and I planted 400 flower bulbs this weekend.

Daffodils, snowdrops, crocuses, and every kind of tulip bulb known to man is now buried in our backyard gardens, and as I scrubbed the dirt from my fingernails, I couldn’t help but wonder if we’d just planted the most expansive — and expensive — smorgasbord of a buffet for all of the neighbourhood squirrels.

“Because that would be just my luck, wouldn’t it?”, I thought to myself. “To spend all that time planting bulbs, only to find that the squirrels eat them all and we have zero flowers next spring.”

Funny how quickly those “just my luck” narratives shape in our minds. Do you do this, too?

I bet you do. In fact, I bet you’ve also uttered the trademark phrase of someone who is a master at crafting stories about yourself and how life goes:

“This is why we can’t have nice things.”

It got me thinking about the stories we tell ourselves, and one particular parable came to mind that I’ve picked up a long time ago in my first intro to philosophy class. This one’s courtesy of Buddha.

In a nutshell:

“In life, we can’t always control the first arrow. However, the second arrow is our reaction to the first. The second arrow is optional.”

The first arrow is the thing that happens. The actual event.

But the second? That’s the one that arrives when you rush in and place meaning, story, or interpretation on that first arrow. It’s the arrow you shoot at yourself to make yourself suffer even worse, based on how you react to the first arrow.

In my example above, nothing had even happened yet, and I was already crafting a second arrow story. Fun, brain!

But let’s dig into this with something a little clearer.

So… imagine a black walnut fell from the tree this morning and —*PLOOP*— lands directly in your morning coffee as you’re sitting on the porch.

Boom. First arrow. Coffee’s ruined. Your favourite mug’s broken. You’re covered in hot coffee now, too. Thanks, world.

It could end there for us, but rarely does, right? Instead, we fire a second arrow at ourselves and tell a story about why that damned walnut decided to aim directly for your morning coffee. Why it chose you, and your handcrafted coffee mug for its assault.

“It’s because I’m just that unlucky. Of course it would be TODAY — my one quiet morning — that everything would go wrong. Because I can’t have just ONE moment to myself, without trees attacking me… I am always getting the short end, aren’t I? Every time I try to do something nice for myself, it just backfires, and how unfair is it that…” and on and on.

Now, I’m no Buddhist, but there is a lot of scientific basis for the idea that we our brains are wired for story.

As ‘meaning-making machines’, it serves good survival sense to observe what happens, then to extrapolate what it might mean for us. (This is why storytelling has always been a central part of our human existence.)

But — as with many good things — we can take this one too far.

We can fire second arrows at ourselves in the form of shame, guilt, resentment, inadequacy, helplessness, fear, and so much more.

First arrows are inevitable, because life is life.

But second arrows? We get to stop those. Or, in the very least, we can gently direct them, as long as we can truly acknowledge and process how we feel about the first arrow.

So, this week, keep an eye out for those second arrows.

The point isn’t to tell yourself a falsely happy story about bad or annoying things that happen. We’re not about bypassing here.

But you do get to have nice things in life, too, and watching out for those second arrows is how you get to truly experience them.

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