Life's a Beach

 (Photo credit to mykindnesscounts.com)

There needs to be another word for hard.

Whenever you go through something tough and someone says "that must've been hard", it kind of seems like an understatement or a way to make a big thing smaller.

I consider my life to be hard for the most part. Between being bullied for most of my life from a variety of sources to caring for a mentally ill parent and most recently losing that parent to cancer/pneumonia, hard seems like such a simple and inadequate way to sum up the crap that life throws at people.

One of the friends that texted me after she saw my post on Facebook about mum's passing sent her condolences and asked how I was doing. I told her my life has never been easy so there was no point it starting now. I then went on to explain that when you go through continuous trials in your life that they become all you've ever really known, when something is easy you get suspicious and wonder what the catch is.

I think the only way to stress just how hard something is, is to add 'really' in front of it, then people know you mean it. The more you add, the harder it was/is.

In a way, it's like a competition to see who's been through more and how they've handled it.

Upon returning to work and settling in, my boss took me for coffee and enquired about my mother's funeral and the last days as I'd been off for a week whilst processing and grieving. He told me about his time with his dad and said that he couldn't stay for the whole time at the hospital because it was just too hard for him to watch. I told him that my family and I stayed right until the end because it felt wrong not to.

So would it be fair to say that because of my longevity in comparison to his, I'm the stronger person? At least emotionally and mentally speaking?

Everyone deals with events in their life differently, but I'd say death and grief are the biggest ones.

On the other side of it, we also as human beings within society seem to compete against each other to see who has the better or more successful life. Unfortunately it's not usually measured by the amount or level of a person's happiness, more so how much stuff they have including monetary wealth.

(Photo credit to www.lovethispic.com)

Most of the times I've heard someone say that another person is lucky it's due to a materialistic possession. I think a lot of people still tend to use items as a measure of happiness and that somehow equates to luck for possessing the item that makes the person feel happy and therefore lucky.

When I was younger, I always saw a person as lucky if they had a fancy house or a chilled out and easy-going family because they were two of the things I wanted yet was never able to obtain.

Now, after growing up since those days, I've come to realize that the times when I'm the happiest and feel lucky is when I can really appreciate the things that I have and why not having things I thought I wanted was actually a blessing in disguise.

I have a nice home in a great area with a pretty awesome flatmate. My job is flexible and provides me a daily routine and financial stability. I've weeded out the people that serve me ill and strengthened bonds with those who serve me well. I've got dreams and ambitious that refuse to quit no matter how much discouragement is thrown my way. Overall I'd say I'm quite happy, very fortunate and incredibly lucky.

None of that has come easily to me though. I've had to go through the lowest lows I never thought I could reach and have been rewarded with some of the greatest highs I didn't expect.

It makes me wonder though, as I was at the train station heading home a few days ago, why is that some people have consistently 'bad luck' and others just seem to sail through life with incredible ease?! Are they not meant to do anything outstanding with their life or do they just learn differently to those who suffer on a daily basis?

I questioned the other day when I saw a possibly drunken guy on the train talking some kind of hideously embarrassing Australian slang and wondered why he was allowed to keep living his life when he clearly wasn't doing anything productive with it, yet so many other that would give anything for another day, hour or minute with someone, lose out in the end.

Maybe it's the high expectations I have for myself, but I really really hate seeing people just throw their lives away getting high or drunk and encouraging others to do the same. Now that I've lost my mother, it makes me even more uptight about it.

Life's a beach. Some people surf the waves with ease, some watch from the sand, others just get their feet wet and everyone else gets dumped by the waves.

(Photo credit to imgfave.com)