“Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Someone tried to unsettle my tranquillity today, but I did not allow that person to succeed in doing so. This reminded me that, when life takes you to a point where you have to put up with mean and hateful people, then you should think of them as sandpaper. They are going to scratch you, hurt you, damage your surface and rub you up the wrong way. The great thing about this is that eventually, it will be you who ends up smooth and polished – and the sandpaper – well, the sandpaper will just be worn and ugly at the end of this entire exercise.
President Nixon was of the opinion that life is one crisis after another; in the same line of thinking, Wilson Mizner thought that life is one tough scheme, adding that luckily only the first 100 years are the hardest! Well, life is not merely a continuation of struggles, but hardships are surely an integral part of the package of life. It is also true that bad people and bad times (hardships) make the world obscure, but going through these hardships is what refine us and what makes us stronger.
Boris Pasternak said that he didn’t like people who have never fallen or stumbled, for their virtues are lifeless and not of much value because life hasn’t revealed its beauty to them. We will never be able to avert hardship. The choice lies within us whether we are going to allow these hardships to unsettle us or not. It will also play a huge role if we can see that these hardships refine us in the sandpaper analogy. May your hardships be the sandpaper that smooth the edges of your existence!
Adversity is the foundation of virtue,
something to be endured by both me and you…
For that which can’t be cured, so it has been stated,
just have to be… TOLERATED.
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