Sometimes just accepting that things are going to roll through your life is the toughest part of all.
Ecclesiastes 3: 1. 1 For everything there is a season, a time for every activity under heaven.
I wonder if the real strict, bibly (yep made that up) people were up in arms when The Byrds released “Turn, turn, turn” seven days before my first birthday in 1965. I wonder if they were ticked off that some bunch of hippy dudes co-opted the first eight verses of Ecclesiastes or if they were glad that their book’s wisdom was getting the exposure it deserved and missed when The Limeliters initially released “To Everything there is a Season” in 1962. Who knows?
Whether they were miffed or happy it doesn’t much matter. What does matter is that King Solomon (who Ecclesiastes is attributed to and who has mad props for being a smart guy) wrote that everything, no matter how diametrically opposed, has its time. And that goes for everything in our lives.
Like it or not things march through. Some things like marriage and love and honor and truth should be ever-present and some things like toothaches and college and adolescence (yours or your kids) ought to come and go. Embracing those beginnings and not clinging to those things when they end is one of the keys to a happy life. If we fail at that we end up to much in the past or too much in the future.
In business, to state change is constant and inevitable ought to earn us the weekly cliche’prize almost every time. Perhaps it’s that given that we’re sometimes forced to accept that makes us so reluctant to move on in our own lives. I’ve always been curious to know when “the good old days” actually become “good” in our memories, because if we’re honest, sometimes those good old days, weren’t always all that good. There was some stuff we waded through back in those days that we now accept as golden that was anything but gold and my guess is that we wanted to get through it just as fast as we possibly could. It might also be the same sort of thing that tempts us to always look to the future and the next great thing.
While looking backward isn’t good, looking forward isn’t much better. Constantly anticipating the next wonderment is in itself a recipe for dissatisfaction because the future is always this shiny, brand new, certainly-better-than-what-I-have-going-on-today thing. Even if we don’t know what it is. And the fact of the matter is; we don’t. So what’s the wisdom here that old Solomon was trying to impart? I think it’s simple; stuff will roll through. Experience and appreciate all of it.
When it comes right down to it, we don’t have much of a choice. There will be laughter and tears, birth and death, and mourning and dancing. Enjoy it all and realize we don’t know when the good times will end any more than we know when the bad times will and that’s okay.
That’s what makes it all so wonderful and so interesting.
The Everyday Question: What in your life today do you need to appreciate?
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