Life is not a bed of roses. Life can be tough. Worries, bad luck, sadness, injustice or violence can shake us considerably, mark us, or trip us up. Every one of us have had the experience: “how do I get through this?”
On a difficult stretch in our lives an encouraging word can be comforting, but in order to deal with it and overcome it, we are on our own. We cannot determine what will happen to us in our lives, but we can decide how to deal with it. You can decide to go through things as an unresisting victim or to use them as an opportunity. If you do not try to avoid things and are guided by the thought of what has to be done, you understand the deeper meaning of life.
Western and Eastern traditions teach us that even when it seems like there is no way out, rescue is possible.
When escape is impossible, when we have tried everything and nothing works, it is important to persevere and especially to keep hope. When we repeatedly beg to be different, for example, and we do not succeed, in our trials a certain thing or strength becomes apparent that we would otherwise never see.
Falling and picking oneself up again, learning and continuing on has a strong no-nonsense content and something of the real-life feeling that we are looking for.
When you get through a crisis you get satisfaction from the fact that you did not avoid the challenge and that you assumed responsibility. Painful confrontation can be a fantastic teacher. It teaches you to look at things differently and helps you to discover riches that you would never have encountered without a difficult path. Even stronger: what looked like a disaster at the beginning, in the end seems to have been a blessing; that what is lost in darkness, is raised into the light; that which at first threatened to destroy us, in the end seems to save us.
It is as the zen teacher says: "Each suffering is a deep, mysterious form of deliverance, which from a human point of view is healing, but at the same time carries an incomprehensible form of salvation in itself".
