There is always a door, no matter how dark the room is, find it and get out.

Sometimes life will be wonderful. Sometimes it will look blurry. Along the way it will be colder than warm, and then warmer than cold. But through all of it we have to remember that a purposeful journey is never over until the journey itself is over. Rough or smooth, good or bad, the task still has to be done. It will not always be good and it will not always be bad. We only have to keep working.

Not every problem is yours to solve

Not everyone with a problem needs you to solve it. Sometimes all a person needs is to feel like they have been heard. Listening without judging is often far more effective than injecting your opinion or trying to fix something that has no easy answer.

You can go to your friends with a problem and most of them will immediately hand you a set of instructions based entirely on their own life, which they are certain you should follow. They mean well. It is just that they are solving their version of your situation, using their circumstances, their temperament and their appetite for risk.

I have learnt to ask one question before offering anything now: do you want advice, or do you want to be heard? It sounds almost too simple. It has saved more conversations than anything else I know, because most of the time the honest answer is the second one, and the person had no way to say so without seeming ungrateful.

And it is not about giving up. It is about knowing, somewhere in your spirit, that not all burdens are ours to carry - and refusing to sacrifice a single day of your life to something or someone only your Creator has the power to change.

Problems are not a malfunction

Always remember: life without problems is like an ocean without water. It is not possible. If someone lives such a charmed life that they never face adversity, they should count themselves genuinely exceptional.

I think a great deal of unnecessary suffering comes from the assumption that difficulty means something has gone wrong. That a properly run life should be mostly smooth, and that the hard patch is evidence of a mistake somewhere.

It isn’t. Trouble is not a sign you took a wrong turn. It is simply the texture of the road, and everyone who has ever walked it has met the same surface.

The key to life is accepting challenges. Once someone stops doing that, they are done. Only those who dare to fail greatly ever achieve greatly.

Don’t run away from a challenge because you are afraid. Run towards it, because the only way to escape fear is to trample it beneath your foot.

And when we least expect it, life sets a challenge to test our courage and our willingness to change. At such a moment there is no point pretending nothing has happened, or saying we are not ready yet. The challenge will not wait. Life does not look back.

Finding the door

The title says there is always a door. I want to be honest about the part that makes it hard: in a genuinely dark room, you do not find the door by thinking about it. You find it by moving, with your hands out, in a direction that might be wrong.

That is what the search actually looks like. Not clarity, then action. Movement first, clarity somewhere later.

To sum up: life is beautiful, like roses, but it comes with challenges that are the thorns, and all of us have to face them. Those who accept them and get through are the ones who know how to live in the true sense.

So enjoy life, but be prepared for the pricks of pain. Enjoy it like a roller coaster ride.

-Kashish