Anyone who thinks sunshine is happiness has never danced in the rain

I am sure that each and every one of us has, at some point in his or her life, been visited by grief, tragedy, or tremendous loss, emotionally or materially. It may have been a serious illness or accident or death of a loved one, or we may have seen a business or professional career which has grown and prospered over many years, finally come to disaster.

To those who have suffered such a loss, their feelings are hard to describe adequately. There is a sense of utter despair, emptiness, and a numbing of the senses. It can become so intense that one actually questions the whole purpose and meaning of life. Many people are unable to come to terms with sudden catastrophic loss, and therefore, we often hear of someone being so overcome with grief that they have taken leave of their senses, they suffer prolonged and repeated bouts of deep depression, a complete change of personality.

In extreme cases, some victims of hardship lose all inclination for life at all and they commit suicide. I remember a Turkish proverb which says that the best teacher is a bad experience. We should know that during our lifetime, we must expect to be visited by success and failure, pleasure and pain, loss and gain. This is the inseparable duality of life. We cannot value anything without knowing its opposite. We must accept life as it comes, in the best of times and the worst of times, with equal grace and forbearance.

Let’s look at the words from an email that I received quite a while ago. It came as an unsolicited email and I don’t know who wrote it. But it’s worth sharing with you.

“One day, a small opening appeared in a cocoon; a man sat and watched for the butterfly for several hours as it struggled to force its body through that little hole.

Then, it seemed to stop making any progress. It appeared as if it had gotten as far as it could and could not go any further. So the man decided to help the butterfly: he took a pair of scissors and opened the cocoon. The butterfly then emerged easily. But it had a withered body; it was tiny and had shriveled wings.

The man continued to watch because he expected that, at any moment, the wings would open, enlarge and expand, to be able to support the butterfly’s body, and become firm. Neither happened! In fact the butterfly spent the rest of its life crawling around with a withered body and shriveled wings. It never was able to fly.

What the man, in his kindness and goodwill, did not understand that was the restricting cocoon and the struggle for the butterfly to get through the tiny opening, were nature’s way of forcing fluid from the body of the butterfly into its wings, so that it would be ready for flight once it achieved its freedom from the cocoon.”

Sometimes struggles are exactly what we need in our life. If we were allowed to go through our life without any obstacles it would cripple us. We would not be as strong as we could have been and never been able to fly.

Happiness lies for those who cry, those who hurt, those who have searched, and those who tried, for only they can grasp the meaning of life. Life is not what you expect. It's what you don't expect that makes life worth living.