Daily Truth Jan. 10, 2022
There’s a lot of beauty in the world, maybe you’re just not looking in the right places.
At the risk of sounding cliche’, events in life that seem to have no silver-lining, are most assuredly the events that will teach us the most valuable lessons. The lessons we need to learn in order to live a meaningful life. Unfortunately, most people never learn these lessons because they aren’t willing to sit in the pain and discomfort long enough to learn. They also aren’t willing to tell anyone else they are suffering so the “normal” state of being is misrepresented as only consisting of happiness.
In the western world, we seem to have an obsession with happiness. We are disillusioned about the tragedy of life and feel as if we’ve been dealt some unfair blow when things crumble around us. When people ask us how we are doing we put on a smile and say, “everything is great!” Anything that could be viewed by others as a setback or struggle we hide from the outside world because after all, suffering shouldn’t be discussed, right?
Wrong! Not just sort of wrong but very wrong! Struggle is a critical part of life, which in turn means sadness, hurt and anger are critical feelings we are meant to experience. We don’t have to go around sharing our sorrows with everyone we meet, but we do have a responsibility to ourselves and the world not to run from them either.
At the end of the year, I spent some time reflecting on the lives of people who hold a special place in my heart. The tragedy of life has run freely through them…
Divorce. Infidelity. Cancer. Dementia. Death of a child. Loss of a business. Death of a parent. Addiction. Betrayal by a friend. Loss of a job.
This vast array of heartache and struggle has occurred within my small, tight knit community of people I’m walking through life with, within the past year. That’s a heavy load of tragedy for such a small group.
That is life. Life is as much struggle as it is pleasure and the reality is, you never feel the true depths of happiness without pain. You never see the beauty of life if you’re never looking at struggle as a path to deeper happiness.
Some suffering seems unnecessary and unexplainable and I do not believe it is all just “part of God’s plan.” I believe we aren’t always supposed to understand it. I believe instead of trying to intellectualize it, we’re supposed to feel it. All of it.
Beauty doesn’t live in happiness alone; it lives in immersing ourselves in the full experience of life. We find it where we least expect it, but only where we are willing to look.
