You take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and there you have The Facts of Life, the Facts of Life.
Yes, I just quoted the theme song to a cheesy 80’s sitcom, but Alan Thick and company had a point when they wrote this song, you gotta just accept it all as a part of life.
When you try to control things outside of your control this causes suffering. When you live in regret over the past, something that has already happened and out of your control, you are suffering. When you worry about the future, something that is once again out of your control, you are suffering. So how do you live without suffering? By living in the present moment where the only thing you can control is you, and your reaction to external events.
But that is not my point of today’s post. My point is while I need to learn not to suffer, I also need to learn to accept the pleasure and the pain as both experiences of our existence on this planet. Neither is good or bad, they are like a twist or a turn on a roller coaster ride. They are what make the experience of this ride exhilirating, fun, scary, interesting, you fill in your own adjectives, but I think you get the point.
How can you know happiness without ever experiencing sadness? How can you know comfort without ever experiencing discomfort? We need these conflicting experiences in our lives to not only enable us to see the contrast, but we need them to help make us grow. Sometimes in life, like a tree, we need pruning in order to spur growth, and both good and bad experiences are like a pair of garden shears cutting off branches of our being so we can generate that new growth, and grow taller, and stronger than we were before.
These are all just words, and it is hard to put these words into practice when in the middle of a painful uncomfortable experience and accept that experience as just a part of growing, but the first step in acceptance is awareness.
I am grateful for all of the experiences I have had, both good and bad. I have lived a wonderful, interesting life, and hope it gets even more interesting. I am excited about the possibilities of what each day may bring me.
