Emerson's Law of Compensation - Or Why Welcome Hardships in Your Life?

After a grueling five days, you are looking forward to a peaceful
weekend. On Saturday night you set out with your loving wife
seated next to you and your adorable kids lodged comfortably in
the back seat. The family is all set to dine out in their
favorite restaurant. You have been starving yourself the whole
day preparing for the impending feast. Suddenly, the car starts
swinging to one side and you realize that you have a flat.
Swearing, you get down and open the boot. Shockingly it dawns
upon you that the spare wheel too is punctured. Ruing your fate,
you realize that the much-awaited dinner is now not possible.
Then suddenly you compose yourself and thank god for the small
inconvenience he has subjected you to. Your family stares at you,
wide-eyed in astonishment.

There is a harmonious law of adjustment and compensation to which
all natural processes are subject. It plays a balancing role in
our lives. This is an order in which, according to Emerson,
"Every excess causes a defect, every defect an excess, and all
seem governed by the deep remedial force that underlies all
facts." Indeed, it all works out with absolute exactness. Every
sweet hath its sour, every evil its good. Every faculty, which is
a receiver of pleasure has an equal penalty put on it. As a
Danish proverb has it, "After pleasant scratching comes
unpleasant smarting." Every advantage has its tax. For everything
you gain, you lose something, and for everything you have missed
you gain something else.

Emerson's doctrine that every thing has its price - and that it
is impossible to get anything without paying a price for it - is
not less sublime in the columns of a ledger than in the budgets
of states, in the laws of light and darkness, in all the action
and reaction of nature. Indeed, punishment is a fruit that ripens
unsuspected within the flower of pleasure, which conceals it. If
we escape one part we are tormented in another more vital part.
Hence, let us all welcome the small trials, tribulations and
discomforts which life offers us during our everyday existence.
Totalled they will amount to much, and hence save us from the
single, more damaging stroke which nature would otherwise subject
us to.

from Nirmala Devi's Daily Inspiration e-mails