How can time sharpen your judgment of a hardship?
When something painful has just happened, being told that you will be grateful one day can feel like being asked to skip the part you are living through.
You know what you have lost. You may have bills to pay, plans to cancel or people to tell. Any good that could follow is still a guess.
Time can change your judgment because more of the event’s consequences become visible. What you learn later can belong beside what you know now. You do not have to predict it, or call the loss good before you have understood it.
A Spark from Vicissitudes of Life
My mind was sharpened by life's abrasion. I was like a blunt pencil, but I was cut and it sharpened my life's focus. Now I draw my life's picture in finer lines.
What becomes visible later
In “When the worst is the best”, Innocent looks back on experiences that brought him pain and also changed him in ways he values. He describes wisdom, growth and gratitude. The conflict matters: he can recognise a benefit in something that was hard to endure.
His image of a sharpened pencil gives that change a particular meaning. He sees finer detail in his life than he could before. From that later position, he encourages care with the judgments made during change and uncertainty.
Suppose a small shop closes and you lose a job you had hoped to keep. At first, the consequences are immediate. You use savings while looking for work, and you miss the people you used to see every day.
Months later, you are doing different work. You discover that you enjoy teaching a new colleague how to repair things, something your old job rarely gave you time to do. You begin to consider training others as part of your future.
That possibility was absent from your first account of the closure because you had not encountered it yet. It would now be incomplete to say that the event only took things away. It would also be incomplete to mention the new direction and leave out the months of worry that preceded it.
The later view contains more information. You can value where you have arrived and still remember what it cost to get there.
What time has not settled
A better present can make the route to it seem inevitable. You may find yourself saying that the shop had to close for you to discover this work. But you cannot compare your life with every life you might have led. Perhaps another opportunity would have brought you to it. You can be grateful for a change without knowing that suffering was the only way it could happen.
There may also be parts of the loss that have become clearer with time. A friendship fades after the daily contact ends. The savings take longer to replace than you expected. Revisiting the event honestly means noticing these consequences too.
Some hardships remain mostly painful when you look back. There may be no hidden benefit to name. You may understand what happened better and still not know what it will mean for your life.
Related lessons
AI-generated from Innocent Mwatsikesimbe's writing.
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