Why We Experience Difficult Times in Our Life?
It is only when you accept what is and become calm, that you can effectively change anything – Sri Sri
Why life always picks on me? Why me? – We all ask. Difficult time is one of the guaranteed gift for people who live on this planet. Rough and tough time knocks our door without prior notice.
We fail in our endevors and we find our dreams coming crashing down.
Time tests all ties of our relationship.
Sometimes we lose our perfectly fine health or hard earned money in one shot.
All of sudden our beloved ones forget us or leave us, forever.
Life shows us all possibilities and then mercilessly snatches them away.
In short, all sorts of things happen to us.
We always wonder: “Why it happens to me?”
But take a look around, and you will see that it may happen to anyone, and it actually does happen to everyone.
There are many theories which explain why we experience hard time in life; however, we will not dive into them. For now, let’s try to understand this subject with common sense.
Take a hard look at our life and our understanding about it. Aren’t we all expecting one thing from life and that is certainty? And life can be anything but that. Still, we expect life to be fair and just. We believe that life should treat us the way we want and it should turn out as per our wish, that too always. And this always is always a problem.
We also get overwhelmed with the duality we experience in Nature. By Nature, I mean both: The Nature and your own nature. Pain and pleasure, happiness and unhappiness, good and bad, success and failure – they all are a part of our existence. Opposite values are also inevitable as one helps to define the other. Happiness is the absence of unhappiness, and unhappiness is the absence of happiness. We only can understand, evaluate and value them by experiencing them. And then this wisdom can be used for the highest good.
Why Struggle is Necessary?
Ever noticed how one caterpillar turns into a beautiful butterfly? The immense struggle it goes through from each phase from a caterpillar to a cocoon to a butterfly is indescribable. All this stages are necessary and important for the development of its colorful and beautiful wings. Without wings it won’t be able to fly. Nothing from this process can be skipped or avoided. That’s how you should look at the struggle and growth. It is there to stretch your capabilities for your own good.
It’s easy to expect everything without doing anything, but that’s not how the world functions. Pain of actions is necessary to gain the fruits of our desires.
Still we feel that we have to deal with a lot of hard time in life. Let’s try to understand why we struggle in this post.
Why We Feel Tough Time
Dealing with a Zillion Things at a Time
Our life span is short and unpredictable. With this limited time and limited competencies we deal with gazillions of things that come in the form of expectations, goals, needs, wants, dreams, desires etc. We want to achieve multiple things such as health, wealth, power, beauty, fame, love and so on, and almost all at once.
This is truly exhausting and drains us out. We need to simplify our over complicated life by keeping our focus on few things.
It Takes an Effort to Be Successful
We can wish whatever we want, but we can achieve results through efforts only, and there is only so much we can do in 24 hours. Constant efforts wear us out day in and day out. Constant actions bring some discomfort, pain and challenges of its own.
Although, dealing with these challenges only increases your strength. Efforts need to be constantly improved. Multi-tasking sometimes messes up things and increases workload. All of these add up to our stress.
Life’s Very Nature is Not Fair
Life shows you all dreams and then brings abrupt end. Life shows you possibility of success and still fails us. In short, life is not fair. Accept it. Does that mean life is really cruel? I would not like to think that way. Life is playful. If you hold expectations from a toddler to behave her in a certain way, no matter how harder you try, you will not succeed. We should not expect anything from her. We only should play with her.
Similar mindset should be practiced while dealing with Nature. Do not take things personally. Failing to understand this and keep expecting tons of things from life constantly are two sure fire ways to remain sad and unhappy.
Lack of Emotion Management Skill
We all have emotions: joy, sadness, fear, anger, disgust and so on (yes I watched Inside Out – a beautiful Disney movie with my daughter this weekend, and I loved it). I believe, that majority of us lack the education and training of how to manage our emotions. We do feel happy when something good happens, and unhappy when something goes wrong.
Emotions are simply there for us to observe. But if we chose to get carried away with them, they will take us on a bumpy roller-coaster ride.
When any emotion arises, drop everything that you’re doing in that moment and just observe the surge of that emotion. Be aware of that emotion and be 100% with it. Don’t do anything with it, just be with it. Acknowledge how you are feeling at this moment. Be aware of it. Being with an emotion for some time is itself good enough to rise above it. They are like passing clouds, they will not stay forever. This will also help keep your actions independent of your emotions.
When We Seek More Comfort and Be Less Patient
It says, when we seek an attention, all we get is tension. We always look for comfort and that’s why we end up being uncomfortable. Accept a little pain, a little discomfort and a little disappointment with smile. This will do the trick and help you keep moving on with a gentle smile on your face.
In short, know that we will experience difficult times in life, rather complaining about it we should accept it as an inevitable for our own growth and keep moving.
Ever seen a heartbeat in ECG? The graph shows constant ups and downs in a line – this indicates that we are alive. The moment it becomes straight line – We’re no more.
Enjoy the “ups” and stay strong through the “downs”.
Have fun.
Bharat Jhala
