Trials.
Not a day goes by that we don't experience them in some fashion or another. They come in all shapes and sizes: alone or in groups, heavy to bear or hardly worth a notice, brief as flicker or apparently interminable. Yet no matter the size of them, each one shapes us in some small way. What I find most fascinating is the power that we have to decide how that shaping will occur.
Too often we find ourselves powerless to these shapings. What makes this all the more tragic is the fact that this is by our own design. Often without realizing it, we allow ourselves to become victims to the vortex of events that surround our days. Buffeted by the winds of trial, we collapse in a helpless heap. Staring skyward we cry out to whatever higher power we may or may not believe in, our anguish carried heavenward only to crash to the ground again as we savor our sad situation. Without realizing it, we relish the rolling in the mud, smearing it all over ourselves, spreading it everywhere we can. All the while we cast about for the culpable ones, forgetting where the true blame lies. Like a balm to our troubled souls, we convince ourselves the mud of self-pity is actually an unguent that will ease our pain. Soon we no longer recognize ourselves, strangers to the truth of what we have become.
This is not inevitable though.
In each of us is the ability to not only clear the mud from of us, but to prevent it from spreading too thick in the first place. The key is in our choices. As the trials twirl around us, attempting to pummel us with their fury, or merely distract us with their vapor trails, we are the agents in our lives. Not the next set of circumstances. Rather than fall to the ground in a pitiful pile we can stand in the wind. Hard though it may be, we will not emerge the same person as before. We will emerge emboldened, enlightened and buoyed up by the currents of teaching that invariably follow any successfully surmounted struggle. Only if we choose to though, as the teaching can become just as mired in the mud as we. To sink or to soar, that is up to us.
What doesn't kill you only makes you bitter.
Or stronger. You decide.