Most advice about hard times sounds like fortune cookies.
But one line stuck with me: Everything will end.
I didn’t understand that line until my first Christmas, a month after my divorce at thirty-five, when I took the bus home from my family lunch.
It was 5 p.m.
The streets were empty.
The bus was emptier.
I sat there for forty minutes, the only passenger.
I felt like the last man on earth.
Failure wrapped around me like the night.
It wasn’t heartbreak that hit me.
It was emptiness, the quiet kind that erases routine, home, and identity all at once..
And in that silence, I thought: This feeling is forever.
Today, that bus ride is just a memory.
The loneliness didn’t last.
The fear didn’t last.
What I thought was permanent was only passing through.
The lesson wasn’t about finding someone new or replacing what I’d lost.
It was about seeing that every storm has an end, even if you can’t see it when you’re inside it.
What ended wasn’t just a marriage.
What ended was the illusion that pain was forever.
If you’re in a storm, it will pass.
If you’re in a high, it will fade.
Neither is final.
The skill is to let the sweet times be sweet without clinging, and let the bitter times be bitter without despairing.
Both are temporary. Both matter.