It’s amazing how we go through Life and get through our fair share of negative situations. While we’re in them we often wonder if they’ll ever pass or we ask “how come this is happening to me?” and then BOOM. It’s over. It becomes a distant memory, most times.
And then unfortunately, there are those situations and/or people that don’t seem to go away so easily or quickly.
“The thorn in my side” situations.
I recently expressed to a friend of mine how frustrated I was about a situation in my life that keeps popping up. I told her that no matter how I react to the situation, it’s still there. Whether I’m nice, fair or even firm to help get my point across, the situation has not changed. I told her “it’s a thorn in my side.”
“It’s supposed to be a thorn in your side, it’s there as a reminder of what you don’t deserve and won’t tolerate. It’s there to remind you to not go back.” she exclaimed so effortlessly.
Immediately, my mind did a 180. And I asked myself “why didn’t I think of it that way?” Don’t get me wrong, I always knew that I wouldn’t revert back to what broke me but I never thought of it as a way to help keep me going in the right direction. I always felt like it was unfair that I had to keep dealing with a situation/person that doesn’t want me to be great. Doesn’t want me to succeed. Or better yet, doesn’t want me to move on.
Unfortunately, in some cases, people do go back. They feel like that’s the easier route when they feel as though they’ve tried everything. And it’s understandable. We all deserve to be at peace, obtain happiness and have love surround us and sometimes it’s hard to focus on those aspects of Life, when Life still deals us the situation/person we’re trying to rid ourselves of.
It feels unfair. We wonder, why is it that we picked the rose with the most thorns?
But in carefully removing the thorns from this flower, we begin to see how beautiful it really is and why we had to deal with those thorns. Why we had to get pricked and possibly bleed a little in order to gaze upon it’s beautiful splendor.
Life will always have thorns, but beneath those thorns a beautiful flower is waiting to be seen.
The flower which is single need not envy the thorns that are numerous. -Rabindranath Tagore
Life Lessons from a Novice 