Good times are good,
but tough and challenging times potentially make you great.
Are you grateful for all the gifts life brings?
Seriously.
All of them.
Look, it’s easy to be grateful for the things that are obviously good and beautiful, fun and exciting.
But it takes a broader perspective, a deeper awareness, to be grateful for those things that are painful and show the appearances of ugliness and pain.
It’s an undeniable fact that some of life’s greatest gifts come wrapped in pain.
Can you be grateful and find the good, God and gifts?
To be grateful for those things which drain every ounce of energy you have and beyond; those things that kick you in the teeth and knock you to your knees; those things that bring you to the brink of more than you think you can withstand; this is rare gratitude indeed.
It’s easy to be grateful for the roses. Mastery is also being grateful for the thorns.
For it’s the thorns that toughen and strengthen the system.
In these tough situations you build your strength, resilience and resolve.
Somehow, someway you find the strength, you find the ability, you find more power when you thought nothing was left.
In these circumstances and situations, resides the greatest gift of all.
You learn what you’re truly made of.
In the most difficult times, you learn of a power that works through you versus from you that’s more than enough.
Mystical?
You bet.
Practical?
The epitome of pragmatism.
These “painful gifts” are the gifts that build the faith and the courage to continue against all odds.
These gifts bring resourcefulness, resilience and relentless pursuit.
Learn more about why developing resilience, resourcefulness, and mental toughness is necessary.
Resilience is like a muscle
It can only be developed by pushing against greater odds.
These gifts give the wisdom to find within yourself the power, the substance, and the intelligence that poets and prophets speak of, yet most know little about; and even fewer still ever experience.
The majority of the last seven years of my life have been the most painful and difficult of my entire existence; and yet I am eternally grateful.
The last seven years of my life have been the most painful and difficult in my existence.
Yet I’ve grown and I’m grateful. What have you done? What are you doing? Pain is the mother of all growth.
Properly understood, we realize that it’s the pain and suffering in life that cause us to step back, reassess, develop new strategies, become more resilient and grow.
If life shits on you, use it as fertilizer.
Quit feeling sorry for yourself! Get grateful. Learn, grow, move!
We in some odd way find salvation in our suffering and a certain purification through pain.
Like going to the gym, the tearing down of the muscle is likewise its building up. The fullness of a mountain peak would be nothing without the depth of the valley and the emptiness of the sky to which it rises.
The majesty of a mountain peak would be nothing without the depth
of the valley and the emptiness of the sky to which it rises.
Even a cursory study of quantum physics will show that creation and destruction are forever at play in the cosmos. Something new is birthed upon the annihilation of another.
You can’t control external circumstances—if you’ve ever tried this one you know it’s true. Believe me I’ve attempted many times.
The only thing you can control is your experience of external circumstances; and then, ironically enough, that experience brings greater influence on external circumstances.
True wealth is not what you have.
True wealth is what you’re left with when all you have is gone.
Maybe it’s only when you’re able to find heaven in the midst of hell that you’ve truly found anything. In fact, when properly understood, hell is the preparation for heaven.
Only when you can find heaven in the midst of hell is heaven truly found.
What was once just nice information, transforms to understanding; and understanding and experience transform to wisdom.
And in wisdom, there is nothing for which to not be grateful.
Stay Awake, Love Life, and Be Epic!
James
