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I read an article this week, interviewing Yoko Ono, wife of the late John Lennon of The Beatles. I’d never read much about Yoko before, but reading this article I learnt that she has endured her fair share of knocks in life. She is now 76 (but looks at least 20 years younger!) and some of the experiences she talks about include growing up in Japan when the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs were dropped, her daughter being kidnapped and then having her identity changed by her ex-husband on an access visit and the public backlash she has endured most of her life.

One of the things that really struck me about Yoko from reading the article was the number of times in the interview she said how grateful she was for those experiences. She was even happy as a child that she was evacuated to the countryside during the bombings and had to beg for food (compared to most of her classmates that were evacuated from palace to palace) because she had a ‘realer’ experience. She came across as very real and she acknowledged these experiences were hard. I can’t imagine how difficult it must be to have your daughter taken from you and not being able to find her, but as with the entire interview, Yoko’s gratefulness for what all the experiences have taught her about herself really shone through.

That’s a pretty enlightened place to get to isn’t it? I guess I know that the ‘bad’ experiences in my life have taught me a lot (usually a lot more than the good) and also usually help me realise  that I am a lot stronger than I sometimes think I am. However I realized reading this interview with Yoko that I don’t know if I’ve ever been ‘grateful’ for what I call the ‘bad’ things.  The other thing I realised is maybe they are not ‘bad’ experiences; after all they come with a gift. As Shakespeare said:

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.  William Shakespeare, “Hamlet”

It is the hardest things in the life that often have the most rewards. It is only when we track back and look at the larger picture of our life that we can see the good that comes of the ‘bad’ and the gifts in these experiences.  Like Yoko, if we can come to life with an ‘attitude of gratitude’, whatever life serves us, our hardest lessons can be transformed into our greatest gifts.

Note: If you would like to read the full interview with Yoko Ono from the Daily Telegraph it can be found here: http://imaginepeace.com/news/archives/8004

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