Thriving ...

Thriving is what life seeks to do. But what does it take to thrive? All the good stuff … yes, true enough; but it also takes a little hardship. The hardship is what propels us forward, what immunises us against attack (emotional, physical, etc). The hardship - the suck - provides us with a baseline from which we can transcend/emerge/grow.

Many of us know what it’s like to live in ‘survival mode’ - but our instinct (rightly so) is to extricate ourselves from such circumstance and seek out an existence that allows us to thrive instead. Thriving though, can come in many forms … it might be a cup of tea in the garden, a great conversation with a good friend, a roll on the mat, to win a contest, the pleasure we take from a good book, etc. Thriving isn’t just about bank balance and physical trappings - in fact, I have known people with plenty of that stuff, who I would say were not thriving by the slimmest definition. 

Ask and answer this question: when do you most appreciate a simple thing like a warm fire and a hot drink? The answer obviously, is after you’ve been out in the cold experiencing the opposite … thriving is done by moving … moving from cold to warm, from no options to many options, from unhealthy to healthy … etc. And here’s the main point - to thrive, we need a certain amount of adversity in our lives.

• JBW