Bad Times Are Good Times

Everything depends on your perception.

Life’s rough patches come without warning. I know because I’ve been there. I was immersed in the hole of despair for years.

It all started with one thought that contaminated the rest. I could not break my mind down into watertight departments to perform my daily tasks: work, clean the house, and be patient with my loved ones.

I ceased to be functional and lost my partner, job, savings, and friends. I lost everything.

I didn’t know how to be patient and ended up burning my world with me at the center.

And yet those were good times, times of purging, but necessary times.

Time.

Time is like the river’s water that wears away the rocks until they become sand.

Time ends up wearing out everything because what is static cannot remain.

You can’t have static friends, relationships, jobs, or dreams. You have to evolve.

Time is action and movement.

And you can’t cheat time.

Cycles are traps.

We call cycles circular repetitions of the same behavior that give the sensation of advancing but only make us go around the same thing repeatedly.

Circular behaviors take us back to square one over and over again. That is why it is necessary to interrupt the pattern. And either you do it, or life does it for you (and when life does it, it does it suddenly and without anesthesia).

You have to understand that time is linear, not circular like cycles; therefore, it will eventually drag you forward whether you want it to.

Reality is a tetrahedron.

The moments you live are like a prism composed of four faces that make up the whole.

The idea of the moment (mental creation before the material moment)
The mental anticipation of the moment (desire, expectation, desire for the imagined moment to materialize).
The present moment (experiencing the moment physically when it finally happens).
The memory of the moment (mental representation of the moment experienced).

The four faces combine to form this prism we call 3D reality.

Conclusions

Things do not always turn out as you imagined: sometimes they turn out better and sometimes worse.
You often experience more pleasure in the longing for something to happen than when it happens.
The physical representation of the dreamed and longed-for moment can only be experienced here and now and usually does not coincide with our expectations.

Two examples,

A fantastic trip ends up turning into a dull and disastrous week.
What you thought would be a problem is the opportunity of a lifetime.

The memory of the moment lived is subtly mixed with the moment experienced and time envelops it with emotions such as nostalgia as we move away from it. In this way, we can remember as good moments the moments we once experienced as hell.

Perception

Time and distance improve our perception of things, thanks to knowing the long-term consequences of our actions.

And life has shown me that G. Michael Hopf’s famous quote has a lot of truth in it,

“Hard times create strong people. Strong people create good times. Good times create weak people. And weak people create hard times.”

I have lived in torment and constant distress when I have gone through hard times. But those times taught me to stand up for myself in life: they were good times.
When I have gone through good times, I have been overconfident and made most of my life’s big mistakes: those were terrible times.

This does not mean that I am a masochist and want to live only in stormy times. I’m just saying that life is a struggle, and good times should be times to rest: breaks in the midst of the storm.

We are born to learn, and we need to face adversity.

Avoiding pain makes us weak.

Embracing pain makes us adult, disciplined, realistic, and influential, purposeful people.

Remember this when the storm is brewing.

A virtual hug

Alberto García 🚀🚀🚀