What should our perspective be towards trials and unpleasant experiences in life? Bhagawan lovingly reminds us today through multiple examples.

Some people want to have uninterrupted happiness. When you eat at 10 a.m., you do not go on eating every hour thereafter without a break. You have to give a break for the food to be digested. So also when you experience pleasure, it has to be digested before you meet with another bout of such experience. Just as you have to do some exercise to help the food to digest, you have to go through the exercise of confrontation of pain after experiencing pleasure. Therefore, you must take whatever is given by God as good for you. The mother gets the pleasure of seeing her baby after going through severe pain. If you sit in an air-conditioned room throughout the 24 hours of a day, you cannot feel the pleasure of it. Only when you come in after being away in the hot sun will you enjoy the coolness of the air-conditioned room. After the Mahabharata war was over, Krishna asked Kunti, the mother of the Pandavas, what she wanted. She requested that she should be blessed with troubles always, as only then she would be constantly remembering God, as they did when they were in the forest. She said she was not thinking of God when she was enjoying the palace life as a queen earlier. You enjoy the sweetness of chanting the Lord’s name only when you are in distress.

- Divine Discourse, Jan 01, 1994