Splinters and pearls and other reasons to welcome life's difficult moments...

My daily reading today included timely wisdom on the subject of how we tend to deal with difficulty and conflict in our lives. For most of us, the prospect of dealing with a crisis or relational confrontation is an unpleasant thing...something to be avoided whenever possible.

But what if we could see difficulties with new eyes, and actually change our perspective so that we could genuinely welcome difficulties and conflict as gifts to be cherished, rather than a curse to be avoided?

I thought about the story I've heard many times about pearls, and the fact that they are created through a process of friction within the oyster. When I looked up the subject, I was surprised by what I learned. Apparently, the creation of a pearl doesn't even begin until a foreign substance slips into the oyster and irritates the oyster's mantle of protection. The process is compared to what we experience when we get a splinter under our skin.

What is the oyster's reaction to this irritant?? It generates a substance to cover up the irritating object and avoid the friction that it causes. Wow. The parallels to our human reaction to irritation are striking, to me at least.... How many times do we try and cover up the things that irritate us? How often have you tried to put something...time, space, activity, other people...in between you and the thing (or person) that is irritating you?

For the oyster, and I think for us as well, the instinct to cover up the irritant is driven by self-protection. What the oyster doesn't know, is that the aggravation will ultimately become a beautiful pearl. Oysters can't know this, because oysters don't have the gift of rational thought...

But humans do have this gift, and so we are capable of looking beyond life's conflict and irritation to see the pearls of maturity and wisdom that result from those difficulties. We are not limited by base animal instincts, but can choose to welcome that which is uncomfortable, knowing that friction brings growth, and that over time, growth can...if we let it, yield beauty.