Proverbial #5: If you can’t live through small hardship, you won’t enjoy big happiness

At a point in our lives, we have experienced the down side of life. The important thing is to take what life throws at us first, then accept or reject it and fight! Life is never a bed of roses.

We cannot also deny the fact that some people have not tasted hardship in their lives! It sounds too real but that is just the reality of life except you want to categorize hardship. It is hard to think the kids or Mark Zuckerberg would ever taste hardship or to say the son or daughters of Bill Gates have ever tasted or will taste hardship. We cannot, however, say the same about Gates and Zuckerberg . Mark at one point in time faced hardship. 

Hardship is not in totality a bad thing but still nobody prays to experience it in life. Those who have had the experience are either great people today or still facing it. There is this Yoruba (tribe in Nigeria) saying that he who is not drenched by rain or work in the sun would be beaten by hunger! It is just the reality of life.

You have to work, go beyond your limit and leave your comfort zone to actually make it. You cannot sit at home and always expect food to be on your table. Even if you now sit at home working from home, you have worked in the sun or rain at a particular point in time.

We need to be humble and understand that life is about stages. There is time for everything. It takes someone who has seen or experienced little hardship to actually appreciate it. You cannot give what you don’t have.

Someone who has faced hardship before would understand what it is like when someone facing hardship asks him for help. It is not really a matter of being a ‘God fearing person’. It takes grace and deep understanding of what hardship means to actually help others in need.

The proverb above is a Yoruba proverb that encourages hard work and at the same time gives hope to those facing hardship. It is like the general saying that if you do not serve someone, nobody will serve you which ordinarily suggests that you must work for someone and appreciate what it is like to be an employee under a boss to know how to be a true boss yourself when you finally have employees working under you.

So it takes someone who has been through what you are presently passing through to truly appreciate it and assist you. There is always a light at the end of the tunnel. What ever you are passing through today is just a phase of life that you must experience. Your ability to think it through, work hard and never give up determines how far you will go in life.

Thanks for reading. Your boy @smyle the philosopher.