Today's
quotation:
There
is never really anything to be discouraged about, because
difficulties are opportunities for inner growth, and the greater
the difficulty, the greater the opportunity for growth.
Peace Pilgrim
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Today's
Meditation:
I
used to get discouraged quite a lot when I was much
younger. Mostly, it happened because things didn't
turn out the ways that I was trying to make them turn out,
or the ways that I was sure they were supposed to turn
out. All my efforts seemed to be for naught because
things weren't getting better or easier--at least, not
according to my definitions.
The
change hasn't come in how things turn out--the change has
come in my perspective of life and living. When
something happens now that used to seem extremely negative,
I see opportunities for growth and change. When I
start feeling discouraged now, I look for the positive in my
life to counterbalance the things that seem negative.
Difficulties come along--at work, with money, with other
people, with family--but they're almost never as bad as I
used to imagine they were. And even if they are bad,
there are still positive elements of every situation, if I
only look for them.
Inner
growth rarely occurs when things are going well. When
we're coasting through life it can most definitely be
enjoyable, but our opportunities for learning come more
often in the form of adversity rather than prosperity.
We grow when we're unsure, when we're afraid, when we have
to face a difficulty head-on and deal with it
effectively. That's when we grow.
It
would be nice to have an entire life without any sort of
difficulties, wouldn't it? I would love to simply
enjoy the world we're in without having to face
adversity. But we can enjoy the world, even with the
troubles that come up--we just have to learn to not allow
those troubles to bring us down, to see them as
opportunities for growth rather than as tragedies that we'd
be better off without.
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