Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses
your understanding.
Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its
heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.
And could you keep your heart in wonder at the
daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem
less wondrous than your joy;
And you would accept the seasons of your heart,
even as you have always accepted the seasons that
pass over your fields.
Life is full of miracles, some big, and some small. Even in the depths of our darkest despair, we can look around to other human beings, to nature and animals, to the mechanisms of physics and the universe, to the mind-boggling complexity of the chain of probability and causality that led to you being here, and to God, and see that life even at its worst is a miracle worth celebrating. 
 
 As the evolutionary biologist  Richard Dawkins  said in his book,  Unweaving the Rainbow : 
 
 We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. 
 Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. 
 We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds,  how dare we whine  at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred? 

On Pain