The Best Part Of Life Is Realizing Why It's Better That Things Didn't Work Out
By Paul Hudson
Life – the most ugly and most beautiful thing in the universe. By nature, all living things are imperfect. Every living thing meets its end sooner or later – even the universe itself will tear apart and, one day, die.
Everything dies; it’s the fate we are all arriving at, closer every day. Yet, at the same time, beauty is only as beautiful as it is mortal. Things that never die can never really be appreciated for their beauty, as they don’t beckon to be seen and loved before their end.
Things that never die, never really live. It’s living that is beautiful and as human beings, we know how to live life to the fullest.
We live life the best way anything can – we live by constantly making mistakes, constantly faltering, constantly changing our paths and directions in life, and constantly judging our each and every move. We live to blunder and to learn from our mistakes.
Making mistakes is a necessary part of life as they not only teach us, but they bring us a step closer to finding ourselves. Being human can make appreciating our lives difficult – many really do have difficult lives.
I’d even say that we all have a difficult life, as difficulty is a matter of perspective and our perspectives are always yearning for more beauty, more success, more prosperity.
The thing to keep in mind is that beauty, success and prosperity are only as good as their counterparts: the lack thereof. It’s the void that we feel moving along our path in life that allows us to truly appreciate what our lives become.
It’s having nothing that will allow you to appreciate everything. It’s failing miserably over and over again that will allow you to succeed. It’s struggling and losing that will allow you to prosper and find happiness.
Everything in your life must have happened in order for you to exist – every single, little thing. You would not be the exact same person if any of your past experiences were different. Even the littlest, most unpleasant things have a way of shaping us into the individuals we were always meant to be.
The greatest moments of clarity in your life will come when you look back at your journey and conclude that it was all necessary and that it’s all beautiful.
That moment you realize that your difficult youth was necessarily difficult.
It’s when we are youngest that we learn most. Life teaches us lessons with rapid regularity. The older we get, the less frequent these lessons become. From the day you are born, all the way through your 20s is when you will decide the person you will be for the rest of your life.
The things you’ve experienced, the things you’ve tried and seen have established the core person you are right now. One day you will likely look back at it all – all the fun and all the hardship – only to accept that it all must have happened, that it was all completely necessary.
That moment you realize if you hadn’t failed miserably, you would have never learned your lesson.
People fail all the time – often failing multiple times at the very same things. Failing is one of the greatest things in the world, as it reminds us how imperfect we are. It reminds us how much we need to learn in order to become the people we wish to be.
Some of your largest failures in life will become your greatest assets. Some day you will realize that if you had never failed, then you would have never succeeded.
That moment you realize that a broken heart has changed your life forever.
A broken heart – whether your own or otherwise – will change you forever. It will change the fabric of your being and will turn you into an entirely different person.
A broken heart is one of the most emotionally debilitating experiences in the world, only falling second to breaking the heart of the person you love.
Having your heart broken stays with you until someone else mends it, but breaking the heart of the person you love stays with you for the rest of your life. It can be a brutal misery, but believe me when I tell you that it’s a necessary one.
That moment you realize your "dream job" was never really your dream job.
It takes some people longer than others to arrive at their purpose in life – it’s not anyone’s fault, as finding our purpose in life is found just as much outside of us as it is inside of us.
But experiencing that moment of realization, of realizing that what you once thought was your purpose in life is not at all your true purpose in life, is one of the most beautiful feelings in the world.
Often we fail at either reaching or succeeding in our dream jobs because there is something more, something greater, waiting for us.
That moment you realize your best friends aren’t your friends at all.
Throughout life, we go through more friends than we go through pairs of jeans. Most of the people we once thought would be there to support us will one day abandon ship and leave us to drown.
Realizing that someone who you thought was your good friend is actually no friend at all is one of the most important lessons of your life. You’ll realize that it’s better not to have any friends at all than to have impostors.
And those friends who are your true friends you’ll learn to appreciate even more.
That moment you realize that being lost for so long was the only way to find the person you are meant to be.
If you are never lost, then you can never be found. If you pretend to have it all together for the sake of holding face then you will fail at life entirely.
You have to accept that you are lost and then find your way through the fog.
One day, assuming you never stop searching, you will find the person you were meant to be and you will accept the necessity of your lengthy search.
That moment you realize the love of your life was still waiting for you.
Human beings compare everything to the things they already know. Often we will find that something we thought was so incredible was actually quite common and un-special.
The person you thought was the love of your life may have only seemed so great because you haven’t met the real love of your life.
The day you meet the person you should spend the rest of your life with is the day you feel more alive than ever before – and probably more alive than you will ever feel again.
That moment you realize your world just fell apart entirely, and you’re still standing.
Life is incredibly complex – I’m not even talking about life as a whole, but each of our personal lives. There are so many aspects and so many details that make up who we are as individuals that it can be nearly impossible to hold everything together.
Sometimes holding it all together isn’t possible. Sometimes things are meant to fall apart and break. Sometimes the life you are leading is so far from the life you are meant to be living that losing everything is the only way you can make it out on top.
The moment you realize that not even loss itself can stop you, that sadness, despair, anger and fear cannot hold you back, is the moment you become perfect. Perfectly flawed, but perfect nonetheless.