Don't Scorn Your Tribulations.

It is so easy to be caught up working or yearning desperately for the "happy life".
You know the one I'm talking about, if you live in the real world at all. The perfect, ideal, Hallmark-card-cereal-box-Wal-Mart-billboard-Elizabeth-Bennett type of life. The silver-platter-filled life in which there are either no difficult obstacles or one in which all difficult obstacles lead to one, ultimate ending of utter perfection.

Life is an ongoing series of peaks and valleys, that is, periods of exhilarating times and periods of time where we sit in a seemingly endless pit of despair.
When we rest on peaks, we feel the need to broadcast it to everyone around us who cares enough to listen. And when we trudge through the valleys, we wallow helplessly until some force, either internal or external, comes along and drags us back uphill. There is so such thing as being sedentary in one position or the other. You will not, no matter how miserable you are, be miserable for eternity. Nor will you, no matter how jubilant you are, be happy all the time.

You feel how you feel because you know how it feels to not feel that way.

Most common ideas in life have some sort of opposite: love vs. hate, turbulence vs. calmness, joy vs. grief, etc. When we feel happy, we savor the feeling because we understand how it feels to be unhappy and how the two states compare. And when we feel unhappy, we envy the happy because their state of existence seems to be a few notches above our own.

With that being said, without hatred, there is no love. Without ambiguity, there is no clarity. Without the foolish, there is no wisdom. And so on and so forth. You simply wouldn't know what one was without the other.


Do not despair in your unhappiness; take solace in the fact that you're going to - for certain- be happy again. It may be sooner, it may be later, but seasons change, tides turn, and the earth keeps revolving. It's the difficulty and pain of tribulation that causes us to appreciate those rare moments of peaceful bliss. Do not resent life's downsides or obstacles because they are necessary if you want to experience life's upsides as fully as they can be experienced. Take things as they come, because mostly everything that happens in your fickle existence is ephemeral. We live highly unpredictable lives.