“…and whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the Universe is unfolding as it should.”
Desiderata

Do you ever feel as if your life is but one struggle after another? I can so relate. My career, at times, has felt like a continuous string of struggles.

My first venture was to start a calligraphy business. I made money with it and enjoyed a modest amount of success, but it seemed I was always struggling just the same.

That was interrupted by a six-year stint as an essential oil independent distributor. It, too, produced a modicum of success but was set aside when our family started a business making terra cotta diffuser necklace for essential oils; Terra Cotta Pendants.

Looking back, I see struggle after struggle. Nothing I did resulted in the huge success I’d envisioned. But now I recognize that each struggle was an unopened gift.

You see, each of my struggles inspired my next venture and led me, finally, back to my writing, and my first book, The Happy Place. The desire to market both it and Terra Cotta Pendants led to the creation of Lifeforinstance.com. This connected me with a wonderful group of people, some who joined me in LFI Hangouts and inadvertently inspired my second book, a book about community building, Sounding the Drum: Community Building in the Digital Age.

The other day, it all suddenly snapped into place. After I publish the community building book, I plan to do Community Building Consulting. This will involve public speaking, workshop crafting, and marketing both online and off; skills I’ve acquired over the past thirty-five years while I was so busy struggling with those other ventures!

Nothing is lost; not one effort, not one failure-to-thrive. Each leads to the next moment of determination and the next inspiration. All of it is necessary. All of it prepares us to go forward to the next adventure.

Looking back we recognize the symmetry of it all, yet in the midst of it, we don’t see that. We only see the struggle.

When does the struggle end? It ends on a bleak day when some version of us is in a box, large or small, and all our loved ones are standing there crying. OR it ends when we embrace the struggle like a large Christmas gift beneath the tree, remove the paper and discover what the gift is.

You never know what can happen, what is already in the process of happening! What strengths will you develop as a result of this struggle? How will they serve you in the future? What amazing venture will it inspire?

A fresh new year is right around the corner. What will you do with it?