Pain

"Pain can burn you up and destroy you, or burn you up and redeem you." Marianne Williamson

As I approach the eighth decade of my life, I can attest that one will encounter pain in life.  It just seems part of the package.  In A Course of Miracles it says that it is not up to us what we learn, but merely whether we learn through joy or through pain.  In my own life I have not found it as easy as just deciding to learn through joy, but I do think it is important to be willing to learn through joy.  It seems to me that Life will present our lessons to us in the manner in which we will most quickly "get the lesson" - whether that path be pain or joy.  There is much in living with dementia that can be painful.  Funny; it is often the little things -- like never knowing that what I place carefully in a spot so that I can find it, will ever be in that spot when I want the object.  It is important, I think, in living in any difficult life situation, that we focus on what is joyful.  And that we learn from the pain and the joy that we encounter.