I recently posted in my Facebook Group how life is not meant to be a walk in the park. Someone challenged me and asked why.. Fair enough! I think this is a good question and wanted to share my thoughts with you here also. The original post:
Life isn’t supposed to be linear. It’s not supposed to be a flat line of happiness and forever smiles. It’s not supposed to stay the same, just like you’re not supposed to stay the same. Life is ever evolving and changing. It is a constant surge of ups and downs and of twists and turns.
Life is meant to be a journey. An uphill battle, a steady climb, and a never ending walk across different soils. Life is meant to be filled with surprises, filled with agony that one day will turn into healing. Life is meant to be full of hardships, tragedies and celebrations. Life is meant to be filled with sad days that truly make you appreciate the good days.
“Life is not meant to be easy, my child; but take courage: it can be delightful.” ―George Bernard Shaw
The way I see this is two-fold. Personally, I don’t know anybody who haven’t had difficult experiences or challenges in their lives.. Just as wonderful or peaceful experiences belong to life, then we cannot rule out that we will experience pain or difficulty as well as joy and love. And in our culture, we are taught and conditioned to think that we should always be happy and that certain feelings are off-limits. There is a general sense that if you’re not happy most of the time, that you’re doing life wrong..
Over the many years I spent in therapy for myself, I learned that each of our primary emotions offers us different gifts, and to avoid any of them negates a unique part of the human experience. Even fear, pain, and shame—emotions we are most likely to try to avoid—serve an important purpose. For me, by learning to tolerate and accept ALL my feelings just the way they are, and not the way I wanted them to be, I could allow myself to become more authentic.
Secondly, for me life is about growth. We will again and again be given the opportunity to grow, both from person choice but also through adverse experiences. Since life is not in our control most of the time, we hit these bumps and it doesn’t feel good.. Growth isn’t always easy. We can either just go through life or we can grow through life. And I know for myself, I have often grown the most during difficulty, or when I had a so-called failure or made a mistake.
I would like to finish with some wise words from the late Maya Angelou:
🦋“We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.”🦋