Finding
Strength
“May
your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous leading to the
most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the
clouds.”
Edward
Abbey
That doesn't sound much
like an Irish blessing, does it? Whatever happened to, “May the
road rise up to meet you. May the wind be always at your back...”
and such? Truth is, struggle makes us stronger. In the words of the
famous British abolitionist, Frederick Douglas, “If there is no
struggle, there is no progress.” Just as we don't develop strong
physical muscles without exercise, we don't develop a strong,
resilient psyche without facing life's difficulties and, like Jacob,
wrestling with God.
Carl Jung said it
plainly: “There is no coming to consciousness without pain.” I
say, don't go looking for pain—plenty of it will come to you. I
know absolutely no one who hasn't had their fair share of
difficulties. It may seem as though some folks skate by with nary a
gray cloud in their sky—the rich, the powerful, the famous—but
when you dig a little, you find that they, too, have experienced
pain. There is no question that life can serve it up. The only
question is this: “How will we deal with it?”
Some of us deal with it
badly—by blaming others, by crying foul, by shutting down our
hatches and not allowing anyone to help. We stay resentful and angry
our whole lives, which, of course, creates even more problems for us,
and for everyone around us. Some of us handle it passively, by hoping
and praying that the circumstances will change, and the problems will
just evaporate into thin air. On rare occasions, that works. Most of
the time, it doesn't. What's good to remember is that there is not
always a good solution, but there is always a benefit to tackling our
problems, claiming them as our own, and then mining them for gold.
Again, Carl Jung: “In all the chaos there is a cosmos, in all
disorder a secret order.” You won't find it without doing the work.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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