All of us pass through different hard situations in our lives.

Some of them end well, and some of them end badly. Some of them bring joy to our lives, and others cause pain.

This balance between good and bad things that happen to us is what’s called ‘’life’’.

And this balance is usually the force that keeps us moving forward, because without passing through some tough, challenging situations in our lives, we will never get stronger, and we will also never feel the real taste of the good things when they happen to us…And we will never learn.

I suffered from a family divorce when I was seven years old, and my father passed away when I was still a student at the age of 19.

Several months after my father passed away, I was reflecting upon my life and asking myself ‘’why should this happen to me?’’

I was very angry, and I saw only negative things around me in any and every situation. Until one day a relative of mine who is almost the same age as me asked me to meet with him.

I never knew that this meeting would later change my life forever.

After we met together, he started sharing with me some of the problems that he was facing.

The ironic part is that after some minutes of listening to him, I lost my focus and I couldn’t stop myself from thinking and comparing his problems with mine, and I started telling myself ‘’what problems is he talking about? Are those even real problems compared to what I passed and still passing through?’’

Suddenly he restored back my attention when he said ‘’you know Mohamed; sometimes I wish that it was me who is in your place’’. 

I felt very surprised, and I told him ''are you joking? Why should any human being wish to be in my place?’’

Then he answered me by saying, ''I did not mean it literally, Mohamed. All that I wanted to say is that I envy your ability to make tough, crucial decisions by yourself. The situations that you passed through in your life made you more persistent, and stronger and improved your ability to analyze and make tough decisions that can impact your life. The only problem is that you cannot see this gift. The gift that you received in return for what you have lost and passed through. You are only focusing on the losses that you had in your life, but I can also see the big picture and the things that you also gained from surviving these losses’’.

After I left my relative, I felt truly shocked by what he told me. The weird thing is that I instantly started remembering every hard situation that I passed through and how I reacted to it to compare it with my relative’s words. And I discovered that he was almost 100% correct.

The hard situations that I passed through in my life did not only make me stronger and more persistent, but it made me generally who I am today. And I discovered that there were some situations in my life that I would have never been able to pass through without preparation. And my preparation was in the form of the situations that I passed through in my life.

Every success, every failure, every hard situation that you will pass through in your life, is nothing but a preparation for a bigger situation or an exam coming later after it in your life.

And the ones that you passed through already made you who you are today. And without the experience that you gained from these situations, you would have never been prepared to survive and pass the bigger ones.

From this moment onward, I chose deliberately to change my focus point. And whenever I pass through a hard situation in my life, I do not say ‘’why is this happening to me?’’, but instead, now I am saying ‘’what can I learn from this situation?’’, and then I wonder about the big test which will follow.

Maybe you are passing through a hard situation in your life now.

Maybe you are also asking yourself, ''why should this happen to me?'' and that's why I wrote this article.

I wrote it to tell you to embrace hard times and learn as much as you can from them because when the hard times will be over, and you look backward, you will discover that they gave you the strength and experience needed to be where you are today.