If there is no struggle, there is no progress!!

Struggles are part of life. Some people are better at handling the everyday ones and carry more resilience; some of us buckle under the pressure a little more intensely.

Life is the sum total of your thoughts and beliefs about life. If you were taught that life will be a struggle, every experience gets framed inside that thinking. Instead of staying open-minded about what comes, you find yourself automatically expecting bad things.

Of course bad things do happen. I am not saying life is always easy. Life is genuinely a challenge, and each obstacle brings its own set. Get through them and you make real progress towards your goal. The reason obstacles stop us so often comes down to how we choose to interpret events, and which thoughts we then choose to dwell on.

Cycles, not random events

You have heard a million times that life has its ups and downs, and honestly, it is not helpful. People only ever say it when something bad is already happening.

Saying life has ups and downs makes it sound like a random string of good and bad events, arriving without pattern, entirely outside your influence.

Things in your life happen in cycles. A bad stretch means you are on a downward swing in some aspect of it - and it also means there is an upward swing coming. Better still, you can do things to shorten the downward part. Cycles are an essential feature of a life, not a malfunction in one.

The difference between those two framings matters more than it sounds. If it is random, there is nothing to do but endure. If it is a cycle, then where you are tells you something about where you are going, and there are things worth doing while you wait.

Life can be downright difficult at times. It can box you in and beat you down without holding back. Nobody ever said it would be easy, but most of us were still poorly prepared for how hard it could actually get. After repeated failures and setbacks, getting through the tough times can feel like a fairytale.

Look at your haves

I know life isn’t all sunshine. But I do know that life is what you make of it. Whatever you are going through today, someone else has been through it too - which is worth remembering, because struggle is extraordinarily good at convincing you that you are the only one.

Always look at what you have rather than what you don’t. We usually want what we don’t have, which only makes the problem worse. To get through the difficult stretches, we need to count the haves rather than the have-nots.

Every morning, find every small thing you can be grateful for. Whatever you have, however little it seems, be grateful for it. Even the problems - because a fair number of them are the by-products of things worth having.

Failure and loss are not the same

Each failure is painful. But somehow, one way or another, you get through. The thing about failure is that it is one of life’s greatest teachers.

I know that sometimes the tough times did not come from failure or from giving up. They came from loss, and that is a different kind of hard entirely. Failure responds to effort. Loss does not. You cannot try harder at grief, and any advice that treats the two as the same thing is not worth listening to.

But even in loss, even when it seems as though every bit of hope has gone, you will find strength inside yourself to get through the toughest of it. Not quickly, and not on anyone else’s schedule. But you will.

-Kashish