Silver lining

What was good about it?

Yes, what was? I woke up thinking that whenever we go through a difficult period, a trying time, when things don’t work and we are hurt, we always remember the tragedy. Which is okay, to a certain extent, because we won’t deny that when you lose a loved one, when you experience a separation or divorce, when you get cheated on and it leads to the end of a relationship, when you lose a job or experience a struggle with a chronic disease, whatever that tragic experience might be, it hurts. Chances are that you won’t see anything good about it.

It is human to see what doesn’t work. It is easier because that’s the most visible thing. In one of those long conversations with a friend over the phone something profound was said. It didn’t even hit me then; because I think I was caught up in the moment-I was going through a difficult period. Friend asked me this question “What was good about it?” What was good about that experience? My immediate answer at that time was a solid “Nothing!” I didn’t see anything good about what I had gone through. I was too hurt to see anything positive in the experience.

A few days later however, I sat in my tiny office, stared at the off-white painted bare wall and thought to myself “What was good about it?” I took a paper and pen and started writing down anything that I thought was even remotely close to being good about the tragic experience that I was going through. I’ll be honest, for the first five minutes I couldn’t find anything good. I scratched my head, pulled my hair, bite on my nails and still nothing came to mind. Then after sometime, I put down one thing, and then another, then one more. In no time, I had a list, not so long a list, but a list nevertheless.

So I started going through the list, one thing after the other. Thinking through it, reminiscing it, reliving it. Then out of nowhere a smile formed at the corner of my mouth, it escalated to a laugh. My eyes lit up. My countenance shone. Some of those good things were happy times in the midst of a tragic event. I couldn’t see the good because the bad overshadowed it. So I realised one thing. That if you look keenly enough, you’ll see something good in anything.

There’s a reason why they say that ‘every cloud has a silver lining. Nothing is ever entirely bad. In the same way that there exists a dualism between evil and good. No one is ever entirely evil. There’s always a little bit of good in every bad thing. It’s God’s order of balance to ensure that you can’t always experience a bad thing without having a hint of goodness in it. Thing is, we never look keenly enough. If we did, we’d actually see that God drops a bit of goodness in every terrible situation. I won’t give you examples, or try to help you figure the good bits in your terrible experience. I’ll let you look for it. So I’ll ask you the same thing my friend asked me sometime ago. “What was good about it?”

Go figure!