A mother lost her only child to a hit-and-run drunk driver. Sometime after the loss, a friend asked her:

“If you could, would you want the pain you feel to disappear?”
Thinking for a moment, the mother says no.

“It’s the pain that reminds me how beautiful she was; how much I loved her, how much I still love her.”

In life, it’s the lows that make us appreciate the highs; loss that lets us see what we had; and pain that shows us how much we loved.

It’s not walking a steady path that makes us happy. It’s reaching the top of the mountain, knowing how far we’ve climbed to get there. Happiness is about finding meaning in the climb.

It might not hurt to walk a straight path, but what’s the point? We don’t fly to Nepal to walk the scenic route – we do it to climb Mount Everest.