None of us knows why we are dealt the cards in life that we are, be they good cards or bad. Perhaps we’re not meant to know. Perhaps the test is not in understanding why, but in how we respond.
We often question whether we deserve life’s misfortunes far more readily than we question whether we deserve its blessings.
When something terrible happens, we ask: Why me? What did I do to deserve this? Why is life so unfair? Yet when we fall in love, experience success, meet someone who changes our life or find ourselves unexpectedly fortunate, we rarely demand that life justify its generosity.
Perhaps neither is something we “deserve”. They are simply among the cards we are dealt.
Life never gave us an ironclad guarantee that it would be fair. It never promised to make us happy or content with what we have, who we are or how we live our lives. The closest thing to a guarantee may be the one we give ourselves: the freedom to choose how we face whatever challenge is before us.
Perhaps that is the unbroken line running through all our lives. Not an unbroken line of happiness or good fortune, because no life offers that. It is the line connecting who we were, what happened to us, how we responded, and who we became because we kept finding our way again.
How often do we hear ourselves say, I want this. I want that. If only things were different. If only I weren’t here.
Perhaps sometimes we should ask a different question. Not simply What do I want? but What do I need, and what can I do to achieve it? Am I prepared, and am I capable, of doing everything that achieving it requires? Or might I be wiser to recognise what I already have and find contentment where I am?
And instead of wishing we were somewhere else, perhaps we might consider the possibility that where we are now has something to offer us that we simply haven’t discovered yet.
We can spend our lives chasing the rainbow on the horizon, convinced that happiness, fulfilment or contentment exists somewhere beyond where we are. And in doing so, we risk overlooking what is already before us.
That doesn’t mean accepting circumstances we have the power to change. Nor does it mean pretending that loss, disappointment or adversity don’t hurt. It means recognising the difference between what we can change and what we cannot, and refusing to surrender our lives to the latter.
Viktor Frankl wrote of “the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.” His belief was forged in circumstances more horrific than most of us could ever imagine. External forces could take almost everything from a person, he argued, but there remained an inner freedom: the ability to choose one’s attitude and to search for meaning.
Perhaps that freedom matters far more than we realise.
We cannot always choose the cards we are dealt. We cannot undo what has happened, guarantee what comes next or make life conform to what we once imagined it would be.
But we can choose what we do with what remains.
We can spend our lives defined by what happened to us, forever wishing the cards had fallen differently. Or we can acknowledge what has been lost, recognise what remains, and decide how best to use it.
Maybe finding our way again isn’t about finding our way back to the life we thought we would have.
Maybe it is about making the very best of the life that is before us.
