I woke up early today. I am not sure why. I didn't have to and I am so tired that I doubt this qualifies as being awake. Then I figured that if I were you and I came to visit my blog and saw the same thing from yesterday, I would not be happy or inspired to discuss yesterday's topics. I mean, yesterday was an awesome Thursday, but today is Friday. There is no comparison.

Last night, as I was falling asleep I was thinking about how every person you will ever know will disappoint you. People will make bad decisions. They can be so stupid. They can get so involved in themselves they don't have anything left over. People will hurt your feelings, not meet your expectations or disappoint you. At times, a person will not be thoughtful. Over and over again, each person we know does something that we won't like. Over and over again, we make bad friends or keep old baggage around. Over and over again, we will continue to make new friends or lovers. No matter how long they are around, something will happen not to your liking.

Yet we will always allow opportunity in our life and we don't want to shut down everything because of past experiences. Sometimes we take a step away from entertaining certain relationships to develop in our life for a while but eventually, time heals wounds and we will be ready to try again. Often times we try again only to come up short again.

Some people we keep in our lives because the good out weighs the disappointments. But there is always some shortcoming each person brings into our lives. Each shortcoming makes us have to learn and to stretch and to become even better, more flexible, tolerant and loving individuals. Because taken as a whole, it is a wonder any of us talk to any others. But individually, it is others that help us to grow, to learn and to enjoy life to a fuller extent.

Could we know the heights of joy if we didn't know the depth of pain? I think so. I think sometimes we use the cop out that we have to know pain just to make it more justifiable. In the long run, we can know joy and be relieved that the pain is behind us. But pain will come again with a different face at some point in life. And it will temporarily make any joy in life less full. But once we move on, the joy rebounds to the fullness it once was and we are glad for it. Sometimes we even learn to recapture the joy more quickly in life than we had before because we are no longer willing to wallow in pain. We are ready to dump the baggage and cut out those who do not weigh out the disappointments. We are ready to focus on the joy we have and the goodness we hold and appreciate the people around us and the circumstances around us that exude joy.