“Sometimes when you’re in a dark place you think you’ve been buried, but you’ve actually been planted.” – Christine Caine

David R Hamilton, Ph.D. – That quote is quite meaningful to many of us.

Why do we love quotes so much?

I think it’s because they give us hope. Well placed words offer a promise of life improving in some way.

I grew up hearing, “Every day in every way, I am getting better and better.” It was an autosuggestion first written by Emile Coué in the late nineteenth century.

He began his career as an apothecary (pharmacist) and found that if he gave patients short sayings, which he called autosuggestions – we now call them affirmations – that helped them expect to get better then they would get better faster.

My Mum used it a lot when she suffered with post-natal (partum) depression in the late 70s.

“This too will pass” is one she was given by her Dad, my Papa, during this time that also helped her. It helped me too when I was struggling with depression in the late 90s.

I was in a dark place. I cried almost every day. Yet it gave me hope, something to focus on, a promise that there would be a day when I’d feel normal again, even if that day didn’t feel like it would be today.

Hard times can be the making of us. Depression helped me to see what was going on in my life that needed to change. It was the seed that grew into who I am today, as a writer and speaker. It ushered me into resigning from a successful career as an R&D scientist and follow a path that was more meaningful for me.

As Christopher Robin told Pooh in Winnie the Pooh, by A. A. Milne, “You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think,” difficult times can force us to dig deep and find resources we didn’t know we possessed, but that were always there.

Many of us become stronger in some important way after we come through a difficult time.

No one in life is spared difficulties, even if we sometimes imagine other people have it easy. A seemingly easy set of physical circumstances for one person, envied by another, can mask a host of mental health challenges.

I know that from experience. As humans, we adapt to things, even the seeming best of circumstances. Once we adapt, we want more, or something else that we think will help us feel happier.

I spent a week in India on a meditation retreat over 20 years ago. In one of the local villages we visited, I saw poverty I’d never known. Yet, I’d rarely seen kids happier as they kicked a flattened coca cola can around as a makeshift football.

A child in dirty, tattered clothing threw his arms in the air in jubilation when he scored a goal by kicking the ‘ball’ through a gap between two small mounds of rubbish by the side of the road. It stuck in my mind the whole week. I’d been worrying about getting into more debt and it was keeping me up at night. I was as rich as a king to him.

He wouldn’t have been able to fathom why I was so stressed while having so much.

Of course, this is not to belittle anyone’s individual worries or circumstances. Whatever situations we face are valid for us because they’re set against the backdrop of circumstances we’ve always known.

Just sometimes, though, perspective can provide a little relief.

Some gratitude studies found that when asked to consider, “I’m glad I’m not…” instead of “I wish I was…” it had a positive impact on people’s happiness and overall satisfaction in life. “I wish I was…” actually made people more unhappy. In psychology, it’s known as an upward comparison.

Comparing what you have to what others don’t have, known as a downward comparison, on the other hand, encourages us to see our lives through the lens of perspective, offering us an alternative way to view things, to notice that our grass is a lot greener than we realised.

When my sisters and I complained as children at being forced to eat boiled potatoes, our Mum would remind us that there are starving children in the world who don’t have anything at all to eat. As a child, it was just words. I wanted chips because they had a taste. But in time, those words did get through to me and I learned to appreciate what I had rather than pine too much for what I didn’t.

It’s served me well to this day, although as some have pointed out, perhaps if I was a little less content to accept what I have and be a bit more goal oriented, then maybe I’d be more successful. Maybe. Maybe there’s middle ground somewhere that I’ve not yet found.

To me, success doesn’t always have to be measured by the yardstick of accomplishments in business, sports, or finance. Success to many is being able to find peace despite what is happening around them.

But regardless of our circumstances, difficult times can be the making of us. They can plant us deep. Very deep, sometimes. So deep it feels there’s no escape. But growth is inevitable.

This is not just a platitude, but an offering of a few extra words that might serve as a guiding light in the dark. It’s the nature of all things to change, to grow. Buddhists call it impermanence. Some things just need time. Some people just need time.

When Immaculée Ilibagiza, a survivor of the Rawandan holocaust in 1994 found herself hiding in a tiny bathroom with several other women, she was terrified. Soon the terror turned to grief and then anger once she learned, from the celebratory songs of those doing the killing whom she could occasionally hear through the walls of the hidden bathroom, that her parents had been murdered.

Realising she could not cope any longer, she turned to prayer. Her constant prayer became, “Please God, help me to forgive.”

When she and the other women finally got out and made a journey to safety, Immaculée was a completely different person to the one who entered that tiny room 91 days earlier. She was able to face one of the perpetrators, a teacher she had known all her life, and forgive him, and in the process find a previously unknown depth of peace in herself.

In her bestselling book, Left To Tell, she noted that sometimes in life there’s nothing at all you can do to change a situation. These are times where all you can do is change yourself.

Sometimes, many times in fact, that’s the whole point.

There are times in life when we are planted, not buried, so that we can grow into beautiful flowers. During the growth period, we have to do what we can to cope, sometimes even to survive.

Sometimes we have to make our own light. Immaculée became the light she was searching for.

I’ve found that if there are times when you don’t know what to do or which way to turn, try kindness. Being kind to others, despite how challenging things are for ourselves, even if it’s merely a silent prayer for the wellbeing of someone or for the ability or strength to forgive, makes us a source of light. And this light becomes our guide.

In life, we sometimes feel planted so deep that there’s nothing else we can do other than rearrange our thinking, our mindsets, the way we have determined our priorities or what’s important, or even so that we can find some meaning or purpose.

Once we make this change in ourselves, whatever it is, the world we experience begins to change around us.

Always planted. Never buried.

I believe that’s a good way to look at life. It’s a promise of something better when things are hard.

And who knows what version of you will emerge from the fertile soil of life.