Our real blessings often appear to us in the shape of pains, losses and disappointments; but let us have patience and we soon shall see them in their proper figures.

Hard things arrive without labels. A loss closes a door you would not have closed yourself, and only later does the room you were pushed into look like somewhere you needed to be. Patience here is not cheerfulness; it is refusing to hand down a final verdict while you are still inside the event. Some pains stay pains, and others change shape once you can see what followed them.

Think of something difficult from a few years back and ask what it made possible. For whatever is hurting now, hold the meaning open. You can grieve it fully and still decline to call it wasted.