Bad Times Won’t Last Forever| Daily Meditation-December 1, 2021

Today’s Quotation:

When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you, till it seems as though you could not hang on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Today’s Meditation:

One of the advantages of looking at life from a positive perspective is that it rarely seems as if everything is going against you.  Once you realize that life truly is neutral, then you see that when we are down, we usually are bringing ourselves down. Yes, relatives will die and jobs will be lost and terrible things will happen. But for most of us, these things can be dealt with as individual occurrences rather than as some sort of conspiracy that life has concocted. Bad times won’t last forever.

When things do go bad, we mustn’t get caught up in the attitude of being a victim. For that attitude simply helps to perpetuate the negative happenings.  If we can take Harriet at her word, then we realize that we go through cycles in life. Just as the tides of the oceans do.  There are high tides and there are low. But neither one will stick around any longer than it must–each gives way for the other in its time.

I’ve had times when it has seemed that things couldn’t get any worse for me.  At those times, a strange sort of optimism came with that idea. I’ve known that because they couldn’t get any worse, they had to be getting better soon.  And I’m convinced that part of the reason that things get better is because my attitude has shifted to optimism. Even if that optimism has been somewhat guarded.  My attitude has helped to cause the changes.

The tide does turn–always.  Life does change for us–always.  When things are going badly, they are not forever. We have the choice of letting our thoughts get caught up in the negative aspects of what’s happening to us. Or keeping our thoughts focused on the good and the positive.  And our thoughts can help us through rough times if we remember that life is neutral towards us– it can not and will not try to harm us or bring us down.

Questions to ponder:

1.  Why is it sometimes difficult to have hope that things will get better?

2.  What can we do to remind ourselves that bad times won’t last forever?

3.  How can we remind others that their bad times also shall pass?

For further thought:

One of the simplest things about all facts of life is that to get where you want to go, you must keep on keeping on.

Norman Vincent Peale

Credit: Living Life Fully