Bloom by Roses from from Bones

A lump of iron, when chosen for a greater purpose, is thrust into fire, beaten at the anvil, and quenched, over and over, until it takes on its intended form. 

This is likewise the lot of a good person. They are polished, perfected, strengthened, and shaped into something greater than their origin by trials. It is through pain that they become good. 

There is a time to rest and a time to train. There is a time to bow and a time to fight.

So, how can we discern which season of life we’re entering and which way to go when faced with a difficult choice?

Take the hard path, for the easy path is a slide into chaos.

The mind is a cup, and joy is fine wine. Joy fills our cup until finally, we’re blessed with more joy than we can hold. At this point, we can either release what we have in favor of what is still coming, or we can place our hands over the cup to prevent the overflow.

However, when we cover our cup, the joy that fills it slowly spoils. The only way to refresh our joy is to release it, making room for more. We must empty the cup and open ourselves up to new wine from the fountain of life.

Best of all, the love we give away multiplies and returns to us, providing fuel for us to love others even more. 

Not everyone will love us. In fact, most people will not — and many will even seek to harm us. However, we must decide to be either slaves of selfishness and rage or servants of virtue and love. 

Why? Because what we serve, we become.

Many people have said the phrase, “Power corrupts.”

I don’t believe that’s true. I believe power is a multiplier. It feeds both the light and darkness inside us. 

It’s up to us to keep them balanced.

We have tremendous power over ourselves, but we neglect it. Instead, we attempt to control external circumstances and other people through manipulation, coercion, intimidation, and deception. 

The result is anxiety, conflict, and suffering that can be avoided by simply controlling ourselves and accepting the things in life we can’t control. 

Unfortunately, even when we “win” an argument, we lose, because we’ve given power over our thoughts and feelings to another person. Even worse, our thoughts might linger on the argument for days, weeks, or even years afterward.

That’s why, paradoxically, the best way to win an argument is to lose the argument — by walking away from it entirely. 

Most of our sensation of pain isn’t actually pain, but a response to the idea of pain, like fear or anger. 

As a result, our reactions don’t alleviate our pain — they simply alleviate our fear or our anger, and they allow the pain to linger. Even worse, our reactions set us up to experience more pain in a future chain of reactions. 

Willing or unwilling, the river of time pulls you forward, through gentle currents and treacherous rapids. 

If you hold onto comfort and try to avoid every obstacle, you’ll only exhaust yourself. 

Then, once you’ve lost your strength, you’ll be thrown even more forcefully against the rocks you tried to avoid. 

The preponderance of evil allows us to experience peace in times of disaster and gives us strength when others are weakened by pain and fear. 

Most importantly, premeditatio mallorum allows us to align our lives with our values before tragedy catches us off guard. Then, in our hour of pain, we can channel honesty, temperance, courage, and love, instead of descending into darkness and fear. 

Treat each day like a bonus — a second chance to say “yes” to the right things and “no” to the wrong things. 

It’s like that one song:

“‘You can’t kill a man who’s already dead.”

When we orient our lives around consumption, we feed our appetites but starve our souls. The result is depression, exhaustion, and anger. 

The key to joy is to find a challenge that matters to you and embrace it with everything you have while letting everything else go. Joy lay on the path, not the peak.