In this skin.

I was thinking of something the other day while digging my feet in the still-warm-sand watching the last rays of the sun scatter across the ocean.

I was thinking, why. Why are so many people struggling with just being human - in this skin. Why can we not just embrace being in this skin - alive and well. And yet, everyone is fighting their own battle regardless of how picture perfect it may look from the outside. Regardless - and in spite of, and sometimes indeed because of - everything they have been given, that's been handed to them on a silver plate.

And it's not very difficult to answer. It's just sometimes it is so very easy to forget.

We don't grow if we do not struggle. And the whole point of being in this skin is to develop character - to grow. On a wider scale - every culture who has chosen to embrace hedonism and the easy life has been struck by nemesis. And the fundament they built their empire on has been made by sticks that the wind could easily blow to pieces. Resilience is like a muscle we develop through trying again and again and again and again and again. And yet again. And when we crawl through mud and think we are sinking, that is when we must pull ourselves up - that is the turning point where we change, where we grow stronger, wiser and compassionate. That is the moment where we do not care of the reflection in the mirror, because we have faced our inner demons - we know exactly what we are made of.

This is the only muscle that matters in life - developing resilience enables us to overcome our own weaknesses, to have compassion for others who need help and to burn our ego and vanity, because we are not giving into the pressure of a toxic environment to live up to a certain set of fake and hollow standards that are morally corrupted and will slowly eat us up from the inside. Ultimately leading to our own destruction - whether we turn to drugs, foods, relationships or what not, in attempt to numb the pain of disconnecting from our core self.

We must never give up. We must always grow... however slowly, that is the only way.