Life is hard. After all, it kills you!!

Life is at its best when everything has fallen out of place and you decide you are going to fight to put it right - not when everything is going your way and everyone is praising you.

Have faith in yourself, because faith is why you are here today and faith is why you made it through.

Life is hard for everyone. That is exactly why there is such a good reward at the end of it. If you would only accept that life is hard, things would become so much easier for you.

That sounds like a contradiction and it isn’t. Almost all of the extra suffering I have watched people carry comes not from the difficulty itself but from the belief that it should not be difficult - that everyone else got an easier version and theirs came with a fault. Drop that belief and the same circumstances get noticeably lighter, because you stop fighting the situation and the unfairness of the situation at the same time.

Pain has a function

Life is not too short, it is too long. But you have to learn how to live, and you have to have a sense of humour.

We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for the journey. Problems are not stop signs, they are guidelines. Pain reminds you to finish the job and get home. Pain tells you when you have been seriously wounded.

And do you know the best thing about pain? It tells you that you are not dead yet.

Remember, hard times are not quit times. The last battle always seems the toughest, and giving up will always bring the worst defeat. Don’t pray for an easy life - pray for the strength to endure a difficult one.

Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try one more time. It always seems impossible until it is done.

Stop thinking about what could go wrong and start thinking about what could go right.

A note, and I mean this one

NOTE: For those with anxiety or depression, or those simply going through a rough patch - our minds seem determined to tell us exactly how badly everything could go.

But the truth is that things can turn around. Things can go genuinely right, and often they do.

So the next time you catch your mind trying to convince you of negative lies, stop, name what your brain is doing, and correct the thought by asking: what are the odds of this actually happening? Then shift your focus to how the situation could turn around, and to the good things that might come instead.

One more thing I want to say plainly here, because a blog post is not a substitute for it: if the low stretch has lasted a long time, or the thoughts have moved somewhere frightening, please talk to a doctor or a professional. That is not an admission of weakness or a failure of positive thinking. It is the same as seeing a specialist for anything else that is not getting better on its own, and people who do it generally wish they had done it much sooner.

Find the laughter in it

Life is full of ups and downs. The key to happiness is being able to find the laughter and the small moments of joy inside the dark places.

Yes, sometimes our plans don’t work out the way we wanted. That is not a reason to give up. It usually just means the approach needs to change, not the goal.

Life knocks everyone down from time to time, and sometimes it genuinely feels like nothing goes right.

Remember: it’s only a problem if you think it’s a problem.

-kashish