“Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadow.”
–Helen Keller
We all live in a world of both darkness and light. If we focus too much on the darkness in our lives, we tend to become depressed and often forget about the light that is also available to us. In fact, we often have the opportunity to walk from darkness into the glowing light if we will just initiate the journey, but many of us are so focused on the darkness that we fail to see the pathway to the light.
When one travels by air, it is often necessary for the plane to take off when there are still dark clouds overhead. As passengers, we feel very uneasy as the plane rises into the dark clouds above. But often, just moments later, the plane bursts through the layer of dark clouds into the bright gleaming sunshine above. That is always a wonderful and euphoric feeling.
Life is often like that. When we are struggling to overcome what may seem like overwhelming odds, the darkness can be devastating. But as we continue to rise above our problems and focus on the sunshine of life, we may experience the same kind of exhilarating feeling as that of air travelers when they burst through the clouds.
Life is a mixed bag. Everybody experiences rainy days as well as sunny ones. We may wish that we had only sunny days, but life just doesn’t work that way. Some rain must fall into the lives of each and every one of us, and perhaps it even serves a useful purpose. If we never experienced rain, how would we know just how wonderful sunshine can be? Perhaps more rain falls into the lives of some of us than others, at least it often seems that way. But regardless of how many problems we have, we can always increase our happiness by focusing on the good days of life.
Sometimes we are so down that it is difficult to make ourselves believe that we will ever again experience sunshine. During such times, it may be useful for us to go to our memory banks and pull out some of our very brightest memories from the past. If we concentrate hard enough on these bright memories we can relive, in our minds, those sunny days of the past. And doing so helps us to get through our current darkness. As we focus on our bright memories from the past, it becomes easier for us to believe that there is more sunshine ahead. And we all very much need to be able to visualize sunny days farther down the road, especially during our darkest days.
Think about it.
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Copyright 2025
Allen W. Smith
