When Hardship Comes Calling

When everything seems to be going right, you feel nothing can stop you.

You’re on a roll. Life is busy and everything seems to be happening as you would like it to be, or even better. You’re in the middle of things, and people constantly seem to be around you. You can sense the increase in status, success and the feeling of being wanted and valued.

Then inevitably sooner or later, hardship comes calling in some format. It may be in the form of unexpected health, job issues or other other personal disruptions.

Everything seems to shift and become challenging during that phase. Life seems to bring forth lot more questions and uncertainty. Connections and friends don’t call you or connect as they used to earlier. They just don’t seem to have time. Some disappear. In this phase, you can feel most things not progressing as you would like them to and your internal graph continues to fall.

For the totally unprepared, these scenarios can be debilitating and shocking.

Life throws up surprises with all possibilities of good and bad. Most experienced and wise beings would share the opinion that life is a mix of ups and downs – nothing is constant.

On a more practical level, the question about hardships is not whether they will appear. It is about how you will respond when they appear and how much resilience you have to tide over them. Difficult phases seem to last longer and happier moments seem to pass by quicker.

When you work through hardships in a focused manner without finding reasons to blame others or circumstances and focus on things that you can control, your probability of getting out of these “holes” increases. Your energy levels normally become low during such situations and you need to find ways to find sources of higher energy levels – physically, mentally and spiritually. Everything ties into each other. Physical momentum seems to impact mental momentum.

When the going gets really tough, normally your closest friends, family or connections will be the ones to give you their valuable listening ears, guidances, helping hands and shoulders. It is also a time when you need to remember to ask and stay open for help from any quarter without judgment. The ones who care about you will ensure you are on their agenda.

Your hardships provide strong opportunities for learning to cope and rebound from frustration and despair. Hardships lead to the discovery/confirmation of your core beliefs, values, and what defines and matters most for you. There are always things that you can do something about and it helps to focus on them, however small they may seem.

In the end, it is not about how the world sees or defines you. It is about how you see yourself and your life. Your life and search for meaning are unique experiences that only you can experience and complete. When we look back at our hardships, we realize that those hardships helped define us more than our good times.

The wiser, mature beings are those who have worked their way through hardships and understand the depth of such scenarios. Their magnanimity, abundance mindset and gratitude are also influenced by those experiences. The depth of their hardships (especially if life/death situations are involved) faced and their journeys can be observed in the way they interact with the world. Our society needs more wiser beings.

Our lives perhaps facilitate the evolution of our souls.

Best wishes…

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“If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant: if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome.”, Anne Bradstreet, The Works of Anne Bradstreet (GoodReads)

Serenity Prayer: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference…

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