The Role Of Unexpected Obstacles In Developing Mental Resilience #automobile #duet #funny

Yesterday I had a flat tire. Not the slow leak type, not a warning light for two months type. The explosion type, the kind that forces you to pull over and crouch down and just stare at the wheel like it personally betrayed you. And I'm sitting there for 2 hours waiting for help, thinking really this today. But as I'm crouched there, something hits me that this isn't really about a tire. It's about the way we move through life. Because every one of us eventually deals with flat tires in life, flooded basement and dead batteries and broken boilers and leaking roofs and that one thing that goes wrong that suddenly hijacks your mood and your day and your perspective. Sometimes we let one flat tire in life convince us that life is horrible and everything stinks. When in reality, most of the time our life is magnificent. Ever wonder why Hashem made people age? Why don't people have the exact same energy of a seven-year-old until the day they died? For the first thousand years of world history, human beings lived with the exact same youthful energy they had as a child until the day that they died. Avan, Mitsuk, and Yaku realized that this isn't going to work. They realized that if we never slow down in life, we would never stop to think. We would never sit with our children or our grandchildren. We would never take stock of life. And so the mentor says that they did almost the unthinkable. Abraham introduced aging to the world. Yitzlah Davin for suffering. [music] Yakov introduced illness. But all three of us saw the same danger that if life moves too smoothly, if everything always works, if we have the energy of an 11year-old in our 80s, if nothing ever slows us down, we run the risk of missing unbelievable happiness right in front of us. So Hashem placed builtin causes into life. Sometimes they look like aging. Sometimes they look like struggle. And sometimes they look like a flat tire on the side of the road. Not to break us, but to wake us up, to remind us not to judge our lives by the one thing that's wrong, but by the overwhelming 99% that's right. So yes, yesterday my tire exploded, and no, it wasn't convenient and was annoying. But today, I'm grateful it was just a tire. grateful that 99% of my life keeps running with Hashem's unimaginable even when I forget to notice. And maybe that's the fire. Learning to see the blessing even when life sometimes taps the brakes.