Throughout my life I have met challenges with a belief that ultimately everything will be alright. In some of my darkest days, I would find myself reading a quote, “Do what you have to do to get through today, and that will put you in the best place to be tomorrow.” What that quote meant to me was a combination of things, a phrase that my Mother would say, “Pull up your bootstraps and get going” or “Don’t trouble trouble til trouble troubles you”. And then from the play, ” Steel Magnolias” the quote “That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger” (quote credited to*Friedrich Nietzsche).
All of those quotes reminded me that yes, it may be hard right now, difficult and perhaps feel unbearable, but if you bow to it, you may not recover. So keep the light, stay the course and believe that it will get better. Every second you are alive, it will get better.
And my favorite one of all is something that my friend Ina Jones said to me, “Hope rises.” Yes, that is what hope does, it rises and takes you from a place of darkness to a place of light.
Elie Wiesel (a Romanian-born Jewish-American writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor), in his book “Night,” spoke about hope, and about finding moments of the day to see something other than what was all around him, to find some peace and hope in that horror he and so many others endured left me awestruck. If he and others could find that speck of hope, that ray of light in the midst of such misery and carnage than I know when times are tough, I can certainly get through a day to face another.
Through ice laden trees the sun shines brightly.
So go ahead and pull up your boot straps, and know that tomorrow WILL be a better day and also know that hope rises and where there is hope, there is light.
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Lori King-Kocsis is the author of Facing Fifty, mother of 4, wife of artist Paul David. Lori has always been curious about what makes people do the things they do. What kind of jobs have they had? What have they created, invented? What their families are like, their greatest joys and their deepest challenges. It is this curiosity that continues to be a thread in her blog Facing Fifty. She spent most of her early years on a farm, feeding pigs and chickens, riding horses and making castles out of bales of hay, and eating a lot of maple syrup. Lori created Facing Fifty as an affirmation to the age of Fifty through all the complexities and joys of the half-century mark.
