Facing Problems – Sunday, February 10, 1985
In much of the Northern Hemisphere it is the long, gray season when life seems a little harder for want of sunshine. We battle flu bugs and stalled cars, try to buoy sagging spirits against long, cold nights, and through it all wonder why life has to have so many frustrations. We think that tomorrow or next month or even next year will bring us ease. Surely at some point the obstacles will fall, the little problems that bits at us like a swarm of angry insects will subside. That is the time for which we yearn.
In reality, though, those who are the sturdiest and happiest among us have learned a secret about problems—a secret, perhaps, that is the source of the happiness which lights their way. It is this—that there is no tomorrow or next month or next year when life is suddenly easy. Ease was not promised us as one of the conditions of mortality. If we are to be happy, it must be despite the fact that life presents challenges—not by fooling ourselves that someday they will go away.
The happy among us know that life is essentially a problem-solving experience. They expect that life will hold its anxieties and are not baffled when it does. The issue is not whether we will have problems, but how we solve them or react to them. Many are angry when a problem arises, consider it a great injustice, a wart upon the face of experience. We sometimes ignore our problems, hoping they will go away. We pelt at them with our fists in rage, or we devise wonderful escapes. But all of these devices eventually fail.
If we would be happy, then, we must finally admit that life will present us problems in one form or another nearly every day. Once we admit that, we are made free of that sense of injustice that usually accompanies a problem. We won’t continue to ask, “Why me? Why today?” We’ll take problems as a condition of life and gear ourselves to face them and fight them.
Wrote one poet, “Let nothing ever grieve thee, distressed by life’s problems.”1
Said a successful businessman who conquered obstacles along the way: “If there is a problem, there is a way to solve that problem.” When we admit problems are part of the fabric of experience, we can face them’ and, when we face them, we can find power to solve them.
1 “Let Nothing Ever Grieve Thee,” Flemming, Paul, C.F. Peters Corporation, 1961
February 10, 1985
Broadcast Number 2,895