For the past two months, I’ve been living through a bad break. Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth. It might have been a bad break, but I’ve got an awful lot to live for. So now, whenever I hear someone says life is hard, I’m always tempted to ask, “Compared to what?”

Look to your health; and if you have it, praise GOD and value it next to conscience; for health is the second blessing that we constantly take for granted, that we are capable of ignoring, a blessing that money can’t buy. A wise man should consider that health is the greatest of human blessings, and learn how by his own thought to derive benefit from his illnesses. Today I learned that the more severe the pain or illness, the more severe will be the necessary changes. These may involve breaking bad habits, or acquiring some new and better ones. It is amazing how much crisper the general experience of life becomes when your body is given a chance to develop a little strength.

Here is the story of a man who always wants to carry too much. My spiritual quest is the painful process of learning to let go of things not essential. If you are distressed by anything external, I realized now that the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this we have the power to revoke at any moment. It feels odd at how sometime we can get so anesthetized by our own pain or our own problem that we don’t quite fully share the suffering of someone close to us.

But pain… seems to me an insufficient reason not to embrace life. This being said let us for a moment believe and wonder that being dead is quite painless. Thus if death is painless, how much pain can pain be. Pain, like time, is going to come regardless. Question is, what glorious moments can you win from life without the test of trials and tribulations, without the test of resolves and without the test of our perseverance.

I know pain well..

And have for many years.