No one tells you that life is what you make it. It can be difficult or challenging, but it need never be misery. It can be draining or exhausting, but it need never possess your spirit or your will.
No one tells you these things because you have to embrace such truths on your own, or the power of the lesson is lost. No one tells you because, frankly, you’d never believe them.
You have to live it.
Chances are, by age 30, you’ve most likely experienced at least one rotten reality of life. Maybe it’s a broken relationship or a failed job, a bad diagnosis, or a tragic loss that shatters your world (or what you thought was your world) into pieces. Yep. All it takes is three decades and we’ve generally experienced some part of the requisite suffering that human beings endure while on earth. Nobody understands it, except to presume it is all a part of the natural disorder of life – the curve balls that we face in the full count of human existence.
While living through the immediate challenges of living, hardly anyone is able to imagine discovering a pearl within the slop that life has hurled at them. It would not be healthy to do so right away. It would not be natural or healthy, say, for the newly divorced single mother who has lost her job and her daycare provider to see rainbows during the storm. We all grieve as the rain pours down.
Yet, once the destruction passes, a glimpse of possibility is revealed — but only if we are willing to receive it. And that is our choice, and the only thing which separates those who rebound and rebuild from those who collapse and give up.
Rebuilding after tragedy is something humans instinctively do, something innate in our DNA that compels most of us to reach higher even when the ladder has been kicked from beneath us. In time, we construct another.
The resilience, the spirit, the desire to overcome is always there, if you can just find the one voice, the one truth in your life that can summon it.
