How To Cope When Life Gets Hard
The journey through life is not easy. As a 49-year-old worker, it's hard to be told that your job is over and you're being severance for one week. Everything has to start over again for you. Having young children and your husband passes away unexpectedly is difficult when you're married and raising children. Life's tragedies are hard to handle. There's nothing worse than spending all your time and money on something that doesn't work out, and you lose your money as well as the money of others. It's rough, seeing how people react to you, how they treat you. It's very hard and humiliating. Oftentimes in life when you go through something, you don't understand why it's happening to you, but afterward when you get back and look at it, you realize why you needed it. It's not easy to understand things at the time, but after getting through it you realize you were being prepared for better and bigger things. Life will present you with challenges. Do not run from them, embrace them and look at them with an open mind. Unlike most people, don't duck it. There are many people who want things to be easy, they want them to come, they want them to do what they want to do, they want things to be easy, but when you actually deal with what needs to be done and you deal with its difficulties, when you deal with those hard things close to hand, when you handle them right now, when you make those hard decisions that you don't want to make right now, when you learn those things you don't enjoy, but you know you have to go through this hoops in order for you to get to where you want to go.
The key to survival is to do whatever you have to do, because if you don't you're going to suffer until you surrender and say, OK, alright, alright, alright, alright, I'll cooperate, I'll learn, alright. During hard and difficult times, how do you hold on? You must have faith. You must believe in yourself. It is essential that you believe in your abilities. The quality of your service, the quality of your company, and the quality of your ideas must be unquestionable. The only way you are going to get what you want is by having faith. That faith gives you patience as you will not be able to get it as soon as you want. You'll encounter things that make you feel unprepared, so you'll have to deal with them when they happen. You will also be able to act through faith and patience. Don't give up. Keep going.
They have what is called a Chinese bamboo tree in the Far East. It takes five years for the Chinese bamboo tree to grow. In the first four years, they must water and fertilize the ground around the plant every day. After the fifth year, the plant breaks through the ground. In just five weeks, it grows 90 feet high once it breaks through the ground. How long does it take for it to grow 90 feet tall, five weeks or five years? There is an obvious answer. The bamboo tree grows 90 feet tall in five years because, if the tree had not been watered, nurtured, and fertilized, it would have died. A guy is out there watering and fertilizing the ground that isn't doing anything, so people are asking, hey, what are you doing? It's been a long time since you were out here, and there's been some talk in the neighbourhood about you growing a Chinese bamboo tree. Is that right? That's right, that's true. That's what people are going to think of you, so how long have you been working on this? You have been working on your dream for how long, and this is all you have to show for it? You will be treated that way by people. Several people stop because they don't see instant results, and it doesn't happen right away. The more you water your dream, the sooner it will happen. When it does, they will stop laughing. As you can see, during those hard times when you fail, when things don't work out, they weren't around to help. Someone once said, when you're working on your dream, the harder it is, the sweeter it is, oh it's so sweet to you when you achieve it. What makes it so appealing to you? It is more important to become what you are in the process than to achieve the dream. It's far more important. It is something that you get up in the morning, when you look in the mirror, you are a different kind of person, and you walk with a different kind of spirit. You become a different kind of person, you develop courage, you develop faith, you become a different kind of person. Those around you know you understand life, you have embraced it, you know it was not easy, but you pushed through it.