Originally posted on my very first blog Peace.Joy.Pancake.
If it weren’t for the sad moments in life, we probably wouldn’t be able to appreciate the good and happy ones.
Yet sometimes the good feelings take total control of us and sometimes the bad feelings do.
Sometimes for minutes, sometimes for an hour or two but the worst case scenario, or the best depending on the feeling, is when it takes whole days, whole weeks, whole months.
There are moments where we might think that everything is great.
That we manage so well on our own the new independent life we have just started to lead, that there is a bright future ahead of us; because isn’t every man the artisan of his own fortune? Everything will be fine. Everything has been fine up until now so why should that change, we ask ourselves.
We make plans for the future, our eyes beaming with happiness and optimism. We interpret everything the positive way. We imagine good things that are not even there yet but we are sure that this is how everything is going to happen in our lives because why shouldn’t it?
We look up to the lives of others and the people behind them and imagine to find a bit of ourselves in them. We let them inspire us, shape us and guide us into new directions we have not known before. They bring out the best in us and at some point we think to ourselves that yes, we are great and we can achieve anything we want.
If it worked out so well for her, we say, it will be at least that good for me because life is beautiful and God loves me.
Our passions will bring us through life, we say to ourselves before we are off to sleep, dreaming of our futures that seem so bright, we look forward to any soon-to-happen aspect of it, be it marriage, children, a good job or all the exciting things we still want to do before we die.
There are moments of happiness when we think that we have finally made it. We have shaped ourselves into who we want to be and we love it.
We don’t know what the future will bring but in that moment, that is absolutely exciting. Who doesn’t like surprises after all?
Then there are the dark days. The sad moments when we feel like everything has just been an illusion. A lie.
Now we look at the lives of others not in search of inspiration but self-criticism. What does this person have that I don’t? Why can’t I be more beautiful, more outgoing, more modest, more self-assured, more serious or more carefree? More indifferent to the opinions of the rest of the world?
We think that all our previous achievements have just been a matter of luck that will end very soon.
We don’t know what the future will bring and that seems like the most frightening thing of all for uncertainty now means failure.
We ask ourselves whether our friends are really our friends or whether they just feel too sorry for us to tell us the truth about how they really feel.
The new challenges that have excited us just a few days, maybe even a few hours before, now seem unbearable because we doubt that we could handle them well. And then what shall the rest think of us once we have failed?
If this is the monotony of life, then what is the point of life at all, we wonder.
We look at the injustice and violence in the world and ask: “Where is our God now?”
We become prisoners to our negative thoughts. The prior happy days seem out of reach. Surreal, naive demons of our minds. As if we cannot move forward in life.
These are the peaks and valleys of life we could say, but every time we fall into a hole of emptiness, we shall remember that we’ve stood through even harder times and that with time we will look back at all this negativity and wonder how such little things could once have kept us from achieving greatness.
With time we shall learn to appreciate happy moments again for the sad ones are those that make their experience so great.
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