No matter who you are or what you do, life hands you challenges on a regular basis. We face situations that we cannot imagine will have a solution. We look at options that all seem laced with despair. We walk around with our stomachs in knots, unable to sleep, thoughts swirling around the problem that has no good solution.

It takes little effort to call up examples of those times, whether they concern loss of any sort, or things that happen that we cannot control. At times like that I feel as if I am a the bottom of a deep, dark shaft, walls smooth around me, no way to escape, a feeling of complete desolation.

And yet, no matter how bleak the situation, how hopeless and devastated I feel, I know that, at some point, I will begin to see a ray of light. I often say that “things have a way of working themselves out” and, time after time, I have found that sentiment to be the truth.

I have come to realize that this belief is deeply rooted in my core, fundamental to my outlook on the world. I think of it as a sort of relentless positivity, what my mother would have called “looking for the bright side.” No matter how deep the darkness, I know that there will, at some point, be light. It may not be the light I desire, it may be different from the past in ways that disappoint or require adjustments I did not want to make, but there will be light all the same.

Is that naïveté? Is it me being Pollyanna, the character whose irrepressible optimism denies reality? I don’t think so. I think it is, in part, who I am and, in part, the choices I have made, and continue to make. To seek the light, to keep my gaze focused upwards, to continue to fill my full heart.