"We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars." Oscar Wilde
Our beloved best friend and yellow lab died recently. She was our faithful friend for 14 years. She was a gentle soul who always wanted to be by your side. To say the family is suffering feels like putting it mildly. We are all in pain.
The show must go on though, and so I chose to put one foot in front of the other and try to focus on the good. I sat in the backyard and watched the birds flying into the trees, drinking from the water, and I thought of the beauty of life. I saw the sun shining and sparkling through the trees and was overwhelmed by nature's beauty. I spent days focusing on the good, enriching that experience, savoring it, holding every good experience I could close to me. Did it help? It did. The pain isn't gone, but it did help mitigate my suffering.
Suffering is not selective. Everyone experiences it at some point in their life. However, we do have the ability to mitigate the suffering. Focusing on whatever good you can may just be enough to enable you to take the next step, or it may pull you out of the gutter completely. Either way, it seems to me the right way to turn.