When I was a little girl, I thought life was listening to bedtime stories, a stroll by the seaside with my father, vacation in the farm, attending Sunday School, playing house in the backyard, etc.
When I became a teenager, I thought life was having good time with friends, studying, watching movies and listening to music.
Now that I have grown, I am beginning to understand that life consists of my continuing response to the constantly shifting weather conditions of my existence. It is a process which has its highs and lows but in which I am always a central organizing presence.
In my experience, the more I enter into life, the more clearly I feel the pebbly cloth of the human fabric of my existence. And this is because I feel the problem of being human. This problem is a difficulty I cannot shake off and it is one problem I know not how to solve. In fact, there is no solution to it. I only need to learn how to live with everyday problems.
Eugene Kennedy says that everyday problems "come in connection with growing. These are invitations to develop and to come to grips with the difficulties that arise in each new moment."
And I believe him. I feel I have grown as a person after experiencing difficulties in life. For instance, it is not always easy for me to live with myself, my unnoticed changing moods and hidden bad temper, my disappointments and discouragements, my sensitivity and impatience, my health, etc. I felt the challenge to refine and deepen my own unique personality. Meeting this challenge is not at all easy. The everyday problems I encountered reveal me as quite vulnerable and yet at the same time quite as strong. what to me appeared as a weakness at first turned out to be a strength. The times when I had to swallow my pride and chisel my stubborn personality has been treasured moments for me because what I saw as an awkward misfit, I came to know later as a strong and beautiful person.
A healthy person is one who can accept and live with authority, recognizing the right of other individuals in institutions to possess it an understanding the need for some system of rules and regulations as well as that moral standards must govern any developed culture. And further on, if a person senses a need to rebel again ts authority she is far freer even to question or disagree with it when it seems the correct thing to do in his life. The sense of authority is built on a deepening awareness of appropriate relationships with other persons. This involves us, in other words, in acknowledging that there are times when we respond to authority and times when we exercise it.
Indeed, everyday problems exist in relationships within relationships. It is our reaction, whether to an emergency schedule, rainy day, lost bunch of keys, the heavy traffic, a stupid or moody companion, that shape the problems. Reactions are always part of the problem because it is in and through them that we experience the sadness, pain or tension that subjectively define a problem situation.
Life with others is the problem if living. It is at once the best and worst of human experiences, the hardest and easiest, the most of everyday challenges and opportunities. It is together that we finally find and express ourselves and are able to understand where the real treasure of existence lie. It is when we stand close to each other that we also know the region of the heart where the pain can be the deepest.
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