When the dream of childhood ends

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For most people it is the demands of life which harshly put an end to the dream of childhood. If the individual is sufficiently well prepared, the transition to a professional career may take place smoothly. But if he clings to illusions that contradict reality, then problems will surely arise. No one takes the step into life without making certain presuppositions—and occasionally they are false. That is, they may not fit the conditions into which one is thrown. It is often a question of exaggerated expectations, of under-estimation of difficulties, of unjustified optimism or of a negative attitude.

CG Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul

The past isn’t gone

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I survived Hitler’s horrific death camps. People ask me, "How did you learn to overcome the past?" Overcome? Overcome? I haven’t overcome anything. Every beating, bombing, and selection line, every death, every column of smoke pushing skyward, every moment of terror when I thought it was the end—these live on in me, in my memories and my nightmares. The past isn’t gone. It isn’t transcended or excised. It lives on in me. But so does the perspective it has afforded me: that I lived to see liberation because I kept hope alive in my heart. That I lived to see freedom because I learned to forgive. 

Auschwitz survivor Edith Eva Eger in her book The Choice

The Mental Fog Begins to Lift

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Over time, you begin to see hints and glimmers of a larger world outside the prison of your sadness. The conscious mind takes hold of some shred of beauty or love. And then more shreds, until you begin to think maybe, just maybe, there is something better on the far side of despair.

I have no doubt that I will eventually repeat the cycle of depression. But now I have some self-knowledge that can’t be taken away. I know that — when I’m in my right mind — I choose hope.

Michael Gerson, published in the Washington Post 

 

Staying Power

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Faith supplies staying power. It contains dynamic to keep one going when the going is hard. Anybody can keep going when the going is good, but some extra ingredient is needed to enable you to keep fighting when it seems that everything is against you.

You may counter, "But you don’t know my circumstances. I am in a different situation than anybody else and I am as far down as a human being can get.

In that case you are fortunate, for if you are as far down as you can get there is no further down you can go. There is only one direction you can take from this position, and that is up. So your situation is quite encouraging. However, I caution you not to take the attitude that you are in a situation in which nobody has ever been before. There is no such situation.

Practically speaking, there are only a few human stories and they have all been enacted previously. This is a fact that you must never forget – there are people who have overcome every conceivable difficult situation, even the one in which you now find yourself and which to you seems utterly hopeless. So did it seem to some others, but they found an out, a way up, a path over, a pass through.

Norman Vincent Peale,  The Power of Positive Thinking