Without bad times, there'd be no good times

I was sitting in the library today, and a pair of christians sat down next to me. They were an odd pair, one who was obviously in retirement and the other of south asian ancestry. Odder still is their choice of location to have their conversation: the quietest section of the library.

In fact, I wasn't even paying attention to them at first as I was fixated on trying to resolve the latest woe to befall upon me. My laptop is dying a slow and painful death. What's worse is that this laptop is the one device I do all of my photographic work on, and I can't work without it. Oddly, I wasn't upset. I was annoyed. I was annoyed at the fact that something else had gone wrong, as if I hadn't suffered enough already.

As I sat there, resisting the urge to take my fist and slam it down hard on the center of the keyboard, I caught a bit of their conversation. They were talking about some deacon who had recently stopped by and given a lecture on how good it was to be here now. Both men had the same complaint regarding the topic.

They both agreed that it was great to be happy about living in such good times, but it didn't prepare you for the bad times. Only in the bad times when everything was going wrong, could you appreciate how good these times really were. I paused for a moment to consider that.

There's no denying that if I ever get through this, every moment that I am far away from here and now, I will be fully aware of how good I have it because I'll remember this dark time of my life. Heck, I know that for the rest of my life, I will work at never permitting myself to ever approach a thousand miles of the circumstances I find myself in now. These dark thoughts that cross my mind have been hard to keep at bay and I know that I have changed considerably by even entertaining what I have never thought of before.

Yet, having not suffered the attacks both from external circumstances and the internal strife, I'd never really be able to say that good times are all that great.

On a flat plain, everywhere you look, the land is flat. How would you be able to say that a small bump is a hill or a mountain? Without valleys, there'd be no mountains to be inspired by.