Loving the Hard Things in Life

The part of the journey that gets hard and seems grueling is always the hardest to love. It doesn’t matter the goal, path, adventure or situation, when things get hard it is difficult to enjoy the experience. No one wants problems and stress from it. The hard things make us doubt ourselves, question what we’re doing and even raises our fear of failing. Life lesson or not, the hard things are not always pleasant. Sigh. It makes it tempting to give up, pack it in and go to where it is easier, doesn’t it?

I envy the people who feel happiness regardless of what is going on. Maybe they are just really good at faking it but you can usually tell that. I’m talking about the people who despite fires in every direction around them, they are at peace in their life. Yes those problems are concerning but they don’t let it interfere with their stress level, patience, kindness, and joy in their heart. They still seem to rise up in the morning and see the good in the world even when it is flinging it’s worst down on them. I am not one of these people, yet anyway.

When problems come up in my life, I go into survivor mode. My focus is on what I need to do to protect myself mostly followed by how do I fix whatever is going on. I think that is natural. Most of us know to duck and take cover when a storm is coming and then we go out and assess the damage and start cleaning up. Loving that idea of having to go clean up a mess or put out a fire in our lives is where things get interesting. Our reaction, approach, what we think in that moment and how we feel all merge together into a big convoluted messy feeling that can be overwhelming and stressful. That too is pretty natural and it is where I tend to get mad rather than happy.

Unlike the person who can find joy in everything when it is all going wrong, I tend to feel angry. Having peace in my kingdom is super important to me. It’s where I feel safe and like I’m in control of things. These fires of life remind me I am not in control of anything and to prove it, problems seem to really blow up some things at times too, making it worse. I get we are all supposed to learn something from the good and bad experiences in our life but some of those big problems are really hard to feel anything about other than relief when they are over.

I have come to realize though that there is value in leaning into natural living when it comes to problems. There are oils for physical and emotional support certainly but deeper than that, I believe nature offers us guidance in all of those problems as well. The biggest thing I have noticed by doing this is that I feel calmer in the storms of life and I am able to say what I want, what matters and where I want to go, instead of just what I don’t want or like. Very often it is easy to describe what we don’t want or what sucks but it is much more valuable to know in our hearts what we do want and be bold enough to say it in the middle of a storm.

Perhaps the person who can find joy in any circumstance understands this the best. They see problems in life as not problems but as directional guides in their journey. Sometimes when we travel there are storms we pass through and we make decisions to keep going, albeit slower maybe or stop and let it pass. We also often find things that impact us in those storms that change our direction, swirl us around a few times and get us lost. Yet having that inner compass that says our true direction and knowing our heart clearly is where that taken off the track event doesn’t really stop us. We still find our way. We still make it where we’re are meant to be. It just may take a little longer than we anticipated.