Life is a bed of roses with lots of thorns

"I learned there are troubles of more than one kind. Some come from ahead, others come from behind. But I've bought a big bat. I'm all ready, you see. Now my troubles are going to have trouble with me. 
- Dr. Seuss
 "Love me when I least deserve it, because that's when I need it the most..."- Anon
 "The gem cannot be polished without friction, nor man perfected without trials" - Anon

I have a thing for quotes, the wisdom of decades squeezed into a few lines. Anyway, there is something about roses that makes ladies smile (even the ones who say its a fancy car or nothing) roses are very pretty.

Growing up as a child in London my neighbour, an old Albanian widow, kept all colours of roses in her garden, red, yellow, white, they were lovely. Sometimes I would try to pick them but the thorns would always prick me so I gave up. But this woman always wore black, apparently, she never stopped mourning her husband and those roses were cut, arranged and taken to his grave site on a regular basis. They were so pretty but what they truly signified was pain, loss and sorrow.

That's what happens a lot in life, we allow hardship to ruin the beauty of the moment. You worry about the children, about your spouse, your job etc. Many times, we submit to these worries in an attempt to find a solution. A pregnant woman might worry about labour and build up so much fear that when the D day comes she is so hysterical that doesn't even know what to do. A man may worry about providing for his family to the extent that he never gets to enjoy his children's childhoods and before he knows it they are grown and distant. In university you might worry so much about exams that it becomes hard to study properly.

“Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. ...Matthew 6:25-34. If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.

Oprah Winfrey said “My philosophy is that not only are you responsible for your life, but doing the best at this moment puts you in the best place for the next moment.” Do your best, and by no means neglect planning for the future but don't do it at the cost of what matters today. Get to know God and love Him with your entire heart, smile with your children, enjoy every milestone from smiling, sitting up, crawling to walking of that baby. Kiss your wife passionately, enjoy her Ofe Nsala, laugh when the guy in traffic overtakes you from the right, call it ALL joy! The greatest discovery of life is that a human being can alter his life by altering the attitudes of his mind.

Life IS a bed of roses, with lots of thorns.

Ijeoma Olujekun