Daily Gratitude: “The struggles we endure today will be the ‘good old days’ we laugh about tomorrow.”

This may be one of the hardest concepts to embrace but it could become one of the most important if you do.

What might help is reviewing your life (which I highly recommend anyway) and finding those times when something “horrible” happened. And then thing about the months and years after that. How “horrible” did it remain? Sure there might be a few things that still seem not so good. But I will bet you that there aren’t as many as you thought that remain “horrible”. Even deaths and other losses.

It’s not that we shouldn’t feel sad or hurt or angry when those things do happen. It’s that we should keep them in perspective. Remember one post I wrote where i mentioned what a hotline caller had recommended. She said ask yourself (or ask a friend) “if this were September 12th, 2001 how important would this be?” That may sound callus but it isn’t. It’s a friend trying to help us put things in perspective.

We can endure so much more than we think we can. As the days go by, the intensity of even the most devastating event decreases. Our resilience helps us through. We may not think we are resilient but we are.

This horrible experience will, indeed, become part of the “good ole days” if we just wait long enough. But you don’t have to wait “long enough” to start to feel better. Recall what else you’ve survived and that will give you the strength you need.