Even those at the top can know the lows of depression. This was evident from the recent deaths of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain - sudden suicide by people who seemingly have it all.
Life is difficult. There's just no getting around that fact.
Sure, life is more difficult for some people than others - but no matter how hard we try or how privileged we are, it is not possible to lead a life free from discomfort and difficulty.
We are living in an age of anxiety and when we feel stressed out (or sad or disappointed or bored or frustrated), our world offers up a host of ways to numb the pain. Alcohol, drugs, we overeat; we go shopping for things we don't need; we keep ourselves too busy to feel anything; compulsively checking our phones and email and facebook.
The moments in my life when things seemed the bleakest have also been when I found my greatest successes. As I look back at my life so far, I see that the darkest moments were immediately followed by spectacular illuminations.
Now that I'm older, I understand that when things get difficult and challenging, when you're in crisis mode and nothing seems to be going right, what really makes a difference is not that you just don't quit. You use it to leap forward. It's not about clawing yourself back to where you were before; it's about charging into a whole new space.
I prayed a lot. I can almost see the cynics rolling their eyes. But pray I did, as fervently as I can remember ever doing.
It's up to us to make the choice to be grateful even when things aren't going well. To me, it means not just being grateful for the good things, because that's easy, but also be grateful for the hard things too.
I read somewhere that the root cause of upset is unmet expectations. In any area of your life in which things aren't going as well as they should, your pain, anguish, disappointment (or whatever your thing is) is greater where the gap is widest between what you expected and what you actually have. It is harder in practise than in writing - I know it personally - instead of getting my knickers in a twist about how things didn't turn out the way I wanted or expected them to, I try to accept them for what they are.
Do it when a new job is going to take some getting used to, whether it's the tasks you're performing or the people you work with. If your relationship is struggling, change your perspective and get the whole picture. Many of us expect our partners to be a certain way consistently. But your partner, like you, is an imperfect human with his/her own set of complicated emotions and thoughts. So it's appropriate that they may sometimes be distracted or get short with you after a bad day.
Happiness can be found even in the darkest of times if only one remembers to turn on the light. Only when it is dark, can we see the stars. Love the life you have, not the one you expected to have.
Life is difficult. There's just no getting around that fact.
Sure, life is more difficult for some people than others - but no matter how hard we try or how privileged we are, it is not possible to lead a life free from discomfort and difficulty.
We are living in an age of anxiety and when we feel stressed out (or sad or disappointed or bored or frustrated), our world offers up a host of ways to numb the pain. Alcohol, drugs, we overeat; we go shopping for things we don't need; we keep ourselves too busy to feel anything; compulsively checking our phones and email and facebook.
The moments in my life when things seemed the bleakest have also been when I found my greatest successes. As I look back at my life so far, I see that the darkest moments were immediately followed by spectacular illuminations.
Now that I'm older, I understand that when things get difficult and challenging, when you're in crisis mode and nothing seems to be going right, what really makes a difference is not that you just don't quit. You use it to leap forward. It's not about clawing yourself back to where you were before; it's about charging into a whole new space.
I prayed a lot. I can almost see the cynics rolling their eyes. But pray I did, as fervently as I can remember ever doing.
It's up to us to make the choice to be grateful even when things aren't going well. To me, it means not just being grateful for the good things, because that's easy, but also be grateful for the hard things too.
I read somewhere that the root cause of upset is unmet expectations. In any area of your life in which things aren't going as well as they should, your pain, anguish, disappointment (or whatever your thing is) is greater where the gap is widest between what you expected and what you actually have. It is harder in practise than in writing - I know it personally - instead of getting my knickers in a twist about how things didn't turn out the way I wanted or expected them to, I try to accept them for what they are.
Do it when a new job is going to take some getting used to, whether it's the tasks you're performing or the people you work with. If your relationship is struggling, change your perspective and get the whole picture. Many of us expect our partners to be a certain way consistently. But your partner, like you, is an imperfect human with his/her own set of complicated emotions and thoughts. So it's appropriate that they may sometimes be distracted or get short with you after a bad day.
Happiness can be found even in the darkest of times if only one remembers to turn on the light. Only when it is dark, can we see the stars. Love the life you have, not the one you expected to have.
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