Life has a way of surprising us when we least expect it. That’s why they are surprises; we are not thinking about it, we are not expecting it right now. It just seems to happen out of the blue. Sometimes, they are pleasant, other times, they meet us at the worst possible time.
You see the pleasant ones? They’re the little joys that sprinkle everyone’s life and reminds them they are not mere cogs in the wheel of time; that they matter, that something, or someone, out there is watching out for them. That they are not destined to be doomed, no matter how tough and unpleasant the majority of their life is.And we smile, we believe this story these little lucks tell us, because we need them to keep going. We need them to survive. They are the little light on the horizon we want so much to be the dawn of a new bright day and not just one that will soon be lost behind the stormy clouds.
And when we accumulate enough of this pleasant “lucks”, we believe we’re living a fulfilling life. And that’s good because the energy it fills us with, mostly called hope is the driving force of life.
But the tricky part is in the accumulating, because these moments are so fleeting that most of us miss them. Or we deliberately ignore them because we think they are too little to matter. And when we ignore enough, and focus on the majority of the unpleasant ones, we believe we have a bad life or our luck is rotten.
Yet, the truth is we all have the same amount of opportunities to find these treasures. Some of us are just less primed to read the appropriate amount of meaning into them.
However, we can’t deny the unpleasantness on the other side of the divide. It’s real. It’s nasty and it has the number. Focusing entirely on the little moments of pleasantness leads to a fairytale syndrome where we live the illusion of only positives. And fairytales never last in real life because the world wasn’t built to accommodate them. And eventually, it all comes tumbling them like a house of cards.
The secret is in using the pleasant ones as a reminder, an anchor through the unpleasantness. A lifeline to see us through the dark days till we can pick up an extra pleasant sweetness on the way. That’s hope. That’s the secret ingredient we all need a little bit of every day.
