Taking the Good with the Bad

Liking is for cowards. Go for what hurts.

How to land your kid in therapy.

Both these articles are essentially saying the same thing. Without deep pain, we can never experience true happiness; without allowing for the prospect that we will be hated, we will never allow ourselves to be truly loved.

I think this is an important point to remember - you can't have the good stuff without the bad stuff.

Although I tend to raise a skeptical eyebrow at anyone who waxes lyrical about Eastern philosophies (being, as they generally are, smelly dreadlocked hippies - and thus my natural enemy) there is a weird tendancy of the Western world to deny the idea that good/evil, love/hate, yin/yang have to exist equally in order to support one another.

No tribal rite has yet been recorded which attempts to keep winter from decending; on the contrary: the rites all prepare the community to endure, together with the rest of nature, the season of terrible cold. And in the spring, the rites do not seek to compel nature to pour forth immediately corn, beans, and squash for the lean community; on the contrary: the rites dedicate the whole people to the work of nature's season. The wonderful cycle of the year, with its hardships and periods of joy, is celebrated, and delineated, and represented as continued in the life-round of the human group.

          - Joseph Campbell "The Hero with a Thousand Faces"

I guess because my life is going through a ridonkulously good patch at the moment I'm wary about becoming too relaxed, or expecting that it will always be this way (I know for a fact it won't, not just won't but CANNOT). It's not so much, learning to avoid bad things (though that can lessen the bad times certainly) but learning how to cope with the bad times. How to endure, together, the oncoming winter. Because winter will come. Even in June. Especially in June if you happen to live in England.