There is a saying: “Never regret a day in your life: good days give happiness, bad days give experience, worst days give lessons, and best days give memories”
I always find it interesting that as we go through our lives experiencing the things we do, that we do tend to focus on the negatives rather than the positives. Why is this I’ve always wondered, because whether an experience is good or bad there is nearly always learning or something positive that we can take from this.
Now we know that some of us are pessimists, always thinking the worst can or will happen, whereas others are optimists focusing on the positives and knowing everything will be okay in the end.
This saying I feel gives reasons for any and every experience that may happen to us and almost puts them in a box.
We have choices to look back on our lives and what we’ve done and have regrets or be thankful that life has taught us great learnings and we’ve become wiser and sometimes stronger from these.
If we were always to treat experiences good or bad as an experience regardless, reflecting on what we’ve learned, and what we may do differently to prevent or avoid that same perceived ‘bad’ experience happening to us again because we know the signs and the pitfalls and can choose a different direction next time.
Whether our day or an event gave us ‘happiness’ or a ‘lesson’ we should always be able to draw strength from learnings from this.
There is another saying related to this ‘every cloud has a silver lining’ which tells us that there is always something positive we can take from any experience that happens to us, good or bad if we look hard enough.
The challenge is to always treat experiences in life as learnings or lessons and look for how we can use these to either help ourselves in the future or others in the work we do.
Perhaps next time something ‘not so great’ happens to you, you could reflect on this saying and see how this can be used as a positive memory to be put to good use for the future.
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