In your life, you think of yourself as “me, the unique me,” right? “My unique problem, my unique challenge, my unique this, my….” You know, and on a bad day you go, “Oh God, why is this happening to me?” Right? You’ve all been through that. I have. That’s why I know.

And when that happens, I think about it. And what I sometimes end up saying to myself is, “You know what? How many countless people do you think there have been before you who had exactly the same problem and who said exactly the same thing, ‘Why me?’”

And it wasn’t just them. Join the club. You have now officially been invited to the club of “miserable,” because misery begets misery! But that’s not what life is about. To understand, to understand that I carry in me, in my heart, wherever I go, whatever I do, I carry that beauty that I always have been in love with. Love.

I carry a simplicity—that if I can flavor and savor and touch and feel that simplicity on that day when everything feels like a thorn, I will understand the tenderness, the reality of that day, not the thorniness of my problems. The contrast, the contrast. Without the contrast, the picture looks pretty flat. It’s the contrast that is needed.

– Prem Rawat