The hardest things to accept in life are:

1) Death/Mortality : That we are just here for a short time. We have to come to terms with the temporary nature of our existence and all the existential questions it brings along with it. What is even harder is to the accept the fact that the people that you love and care deeply about your parents, your spouse, your children will just cease to exist one day. One day you will get a phone call and it will all be over before you know it. The fact that our planet Earth is a really small speck in the vast cosmos and that even if we die tomorrow everything on the planet will go on as it is going on right now forces us to question deeply about matters related to birth, death, meaning and purpose.

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross put it beautifully in her book On Grief and Grieving:

“The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again but you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same nor would you want to.”

Oliver Sacks put it beautifully in his book Gratitude:

“My generation is on the way out, and each death I have felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself. There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate — the genetic and neural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.”

Joan Didion in her book The Year of Magical Thinking offers a soul-stirring meditation on grief in all its unimaginable dimensions:

“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect the shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes. In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be "healing." A certain forward movement will prevail. The worst days will be the earliest days. We imagine that the moment to most severely test us will be the funeral, after which this hypothetical healing will take place. When we anticipate the funeral we wonder about failing to "get through it," rise to the occasion, exhibit the "strength" that invariably gets mentioned as the correct response to death. We anticipate needing to steel ourselves the for the moment: will I be able to greet people, will I be able to leave the scene, will I be able even to get dressed that day? We have no way of knowing that this will not be the issue. We have no way of knowing that the funeral itself will be anodyne, a kind of narcotic regression in which we are wrapped in the care of others and the gravity and meaning of the occasion. Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief was we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.”

Fredrik Backman put it beautifully in his book A Man Called Ove:

“Death is a strange thing. People live their whole lives as if it does not exist, and yet it's often one of the great motivations for living. Some of us, in time, become so conscious of it that we live harder, more obstinately, with more fury. Some need its constant presence to even be aware of its antithesis. Others become so preoccupied with it that they go into the waiting room long before it has announced its arrival. We fear it, yet most of us fear more than anything that it may take someone other than ourselves. For the greatest fear of death is always that it will pass us by. And leave us there alone.”

Ernest Becker put it beautifully in his book The Denial of Death:

“Yet, at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways—the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with. The lower animals are, of course, spared this painful contradiction, as they lack a symbolic identity and the self-consciousness that goes with it. They merely act and move reflexively as they are driven by their instincts. If they pause at all, it is only a physical pause; inside they are anonymous, and even their faces have no name. They live in a world without time, pulsating, as it were, in a state of dumb being. This is what has made it so simple to shoot down whole herds of buffalo or elephants. The animals don't know that death is happening and continue grazing placidly while others drop alongside them. The knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, and animals are spared it. They live and they disappear with the same thoughtlessness: a few minutes of fear, a few seconds of anguish, and it is over. But to live a whole lifetime with the fate of death haunting one's dreams and even the most sun-filled days—that's something else.”

Matt Haig put it beautifully in his book The Humans:

“Now, consider this. A human life is on average 80 Earth years or around 30,000 Earth days. Which means they are born, they make some friends, eat a few meals, they get married, or they don’t get married, have a child or two, or not, drink a few thousand glasses of wine, have sexual intercourse a few times, discover a lump somewhere, feel a bit of regret, wonder where all the time went, know they should have done it differently, realise they would have done it the same, and then they die. Into the great black nothing. Out of space. Out of time. The most trivial of trivial zeroes. And that’s it, the full caboodle. All confined to the same mediocre planet.”

David Foster Wallace said it beautifully in an interview in the Review of Contemporary Fiction in 1993:

“You don’t have to think very hard to realize that our dread of both relationships and loneliness, both of which are like sub-dreads of our dread of being trapped inside a self (a psychic self, not just a physical self), has to do with angst about death, the recognition that I’m going to die, and die very much alone, and the rest of the world is going to go merrily on without me. I’m not sure I could give you a steeple-fingered theoretical justification, but I strongly suspect a big part of real art-fiction’s job is to aggravate this sense of entrapment and loneliness and death in people, to move people to countenance it, since any possible human redemption requires us first to face what’s dreadful, what we want to deny.”

Haruki Murakami put it beautifully in his book Norwegian Wood:

“No truth can cure the sorrow we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness can cure that sorrow. All we can do is see it through to the end and learn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sorrow that comes to us without warning.”

John Green puts it beautifully in his book The Fault In Our Stars:

“There will come a time when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that’s what everyone else does.”

Donna Tartt explained the conundrum of human existence beautifully in her book The Goldfinch:

“But depression wasn't the word. This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time. The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the grave, producing more and more new beings to suffer like this was some kind of redemptive, or good, or even somehow morally admirable thing: dragging more innocent creatures into the lose-lose game. Squirming babies and plodding, complacent, hormone-drugged moms. Oh, isn't he cute? Awww. Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells await them: boring jobs and ruinous mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip replacements and lonely cups of coffee in an empty house and a colostomy bag at the hospital. Most people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent. People gambled and golfed and planted gardens and traded stocks and had sex and bought new cars and practiced yoga and worked and prayed and redecorated their homes and got worked up over the news and fussed over their children and gossiped about their neighbors and pored over restaurant reviews and founded charitable organizations and supported political candidates and attended the U.S. Open and dined and travelled and distracted themselves with all kinds of gadgets and devices, flooding themselves incessantly with information and texts and communication and entertainment from every direction to try to make themselves forget it: where we were, what we were. But in a strong light there was no good spin you could put on it. It was rotten from top to bottom.”

Diane Setterfield explained it beautifully in her book The Thirteenth Tale:

“People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the wamrth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They make you happy. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic.”

Lemony Snicket put it beautifully in his book Horseradish:

“It is a curious thing, the death of a loved one. We all know that our time in this world is limited, and that eventually all of us will end up underneath some sheet, never to wake up. And yet it is always a surprise when it happens to someone we know. It is like walking up the stairs to your bedroom in the dark, and thinking there is one more stair than there is. Your foot falls down, through the air, and there is a sickly moment of dark surprise as you try and readjust the way you thought of things.”

I think Carl Sagan put it beautifully:

Carl Sagan's Wonderful Message that puts life on earth in perspective:

Here is a wonderful video where Woody Allen talks about meaning of life:

Steve Jobs put it beautifully in his 2005 Stanford Commencement Address: “Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Almost everything--all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure--these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it, and that is how it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.”

Here is the wonderful commencement speech where he talks about some of the most pivotal points in his life :

Fredrick Backman puts it beautifully in his book A Man Called Ove: “And time is a curious thing. Most of us only live for the time that lies right ahead of us. A few days, weeks, years. One of the most painful moments in a person's life probably comes with the insight that an age has been reached when there is more to look back on than ahead. And when time no longer lies ahead of one, other things have to be lived for. memories, perhaps.”

2) Unfairness: You cannot always control the fate of your life. You do not decide which family you will be born into. Some people are born into a broken dysfunctional family which makes it that much harder for them to be in fully functional relationships.

You may not always get the love, affection and care you deserve. Some scars just don't go away with time.

You cannot choose your genes. You have no say over the fact that how many diseases you will inherit. You may be deaf, dumb, blind and you just have to accept your fate. Even factors like willingness to work hard are also dependent on genes.

A large portion of your's life success is dependent on the genes and environment you are born into and people don't like to admit that because that would mean that life is out of their control.

Nicola Yoon puts it beautifully in her book The Sun Is Also A Star: “People just want to believe. Otherwise they would have to admit that life is just a random series of good and bad things that happen until one day you die.”

There will always be people who will be richer than you, smarter than you, more good looking than you, more happier than you are. There will always be people who will more gifted than you. You spend months learning a skill and some one comes along and masters it in a short time. You spend hours doing make up and don't look half as good as your friend because she inherited better genes. Your socio-economic background is one of the most important indicator of success in life and it is pretty much out of your hands.

There are people with rich dads, beautiful faces, connections and pedigree who have it much easier than you.

Richard Dawkins puts it beautifully in his book River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life:

“The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”

Woody Allen puts it beautifully in the opening scene of Match Point:

The man who said "I'd rather be lucky than good" saw deeply into life. People are afraid to face how great a part of life is dependent on luck. It's scary to think so much is out of one's control. There are moments in a match when the ball hits the top of the net, and for a split second, it can either go forward or fall back. With a little luck, it goes forward, and you win. Or maybe it doesn't, and you lose.

3) Suffering/Pain: There are so many people who suffer so much because of no fault of their own. There are billions of people who are living in abject poverty. They don't have any access to basic amenities of life like food, clothing, shelter, education etc. Their basic civil rights have been stripped from them by different governments and nobody really cares. The media is not interested in them, the rich and the elite don't want to go anywhere near them. They have been abandoned by their own fellow citizens.

I think Ethan Hawke said it well "I don't understand the world. I don't understand why some people have to suffer so much and others don't. I don't understand the unfairness of all that - I can't wrap my brain around it. Seems like it should be the opposite, like global warming should make Haiti discover that they have the secret plant that makes them all rich, because they've suffered enough, those people."

That suffering and pain are inevitable consequences of growing up. People will not always be kind. The people that you may love may not always love you back. In fact you might not even exist for them. We all know of all the greatest sufferings in life the greatest suffering comes from unrequited love. One of the hardest things in life is watching the person you love, love someone else.

Haruki Murakami put it beautifully in his book 1Q84: “Once you pass a certain age, life becomes nothing more than a process of continual loss. Things that are important to your life begin to slip out of your grasp, one after another, like a come losing teeth. And the only things that come to take their place are worthless imitations. Your physical strength, your hopes, your dreams, your ideals, your convictions, all meaning, or then again, the people you love: one by one, they fade away. Some announce their departure before they leave, while others just disappear all of a sudden without warning one day. And once you lose them you can never get them back. Your search for replacements never goes well. It’s all very painful – as painful as actually being cut with a knife.”

I can't understand that why people cannot be just nice to each other. I understand that some people suffer so badly that they want to inflict that suffering onto you but can't you just smile and appreciate life for what it is rather than for what it is not.

This is an excerpt from the autobiography of Mr Bertrand Russell:

Elizabeth Gilbert put her thoughts on grief beautifully on the sudden death of her partner Rayya Elias because of terminal cancer:

“Grief… happens upon you, it’s bigger than you. There is a humility that you have to step into, where you surrender to being moved through the landscape of grief by grief itself. And it has its own timeframe, it has its own itinerary with you, it has its own power over you, and it will come when it comes. And when it comes, it’s a bow-down. It’s a carve-out. And it comes when it wants to, and it carves you out — it comes in the middle of the night, comes in the middle of the day, comes in the middle of a meeting, comes in the middle of a meal. It arrives — it’s this tremendously forceful arrival and it cannot be resisted without you suffering more… The posture that you take is you hit your knees in absolute humility and you let it rock you until it is done with you. And it will be done with you, eventually. And when it is done, it will leave. But to stiffen, to resist, and to fight it is to hurt yourself.”

With an eye to the intimate biological connection between the body and the mind Elizabeth Gilbert added:

“There’s this tremendous psychological and spiritual challenge to relax in the awesome power of it until it has gone through you. Grief is a full-body experience. It takes over your entire body — it’s not a disease of the mind. It’s something that impacts you at the physical level… I feel that it has a tremendous relationship to love: First of all, as they say, it’s the price you pay for love. But, secondly, in the moments of my life when I have fallen in love, I have just as little power over it as I do in grief. There are certain things that happen to you as a human being that you cannot control or command, that will come to you at really inconvenient times, and where you have to bow in the human humility to the fact that there’s something running through you that’s bigger than you.”

Stephen Colbert spoke candidly with Anderson Cooper about his experience dealing with grief. Colbert lost his two brothers and his father in a tragic plane crash in 1974 when he was just 10-years-old. Cooper asked Colbert how he learned to cope with such a loss.

At one point, Cooper was brought to tears when he asked Colbert about comments he made on learning to “love the thing that I most wish had not happened.”

Cooper paused to gather himself as he read Colbert’s comments.

“You went on to say, ‘What punishments of God are not gifts?’ Do you really believe that?” Cooper asked.

“Yes,” Colbert replied after a short pause. "It's a gift to exist, and with existence comes suffering. There’s no escaping that. I don’t want it to have happened. I want it to not have happened, but if you are grateful for your life, which I think is a positive thing to do, not everybody is, and I am not always but it's the most positive thing to do—then you have to be grateful for all of it. You can't pick and choose what you're grateful for."

Colbert said suffering allows people to relate to one another.

“What do you get from loss? You get awareness of other people’s loss, which allows you to connect with that other person,” he said, “which allows you to love more deeply and to understand what it’s like to be a human being if it’s true that all humans suffer.”

You can watch excerpts from the Anderson Cooper’s interview with Stephen Colbert here:

VS Naipaul put it wonderfully in his article on The Strangeness of Grief after losing his father, his younger brother and his cat in The New Yorker:

“We are never finished with grief. It is part of the fabric of living. It is always waiting to happen. Love makes memories and life precious; the grief that comes to us is proportionate to that love and is inescapable. This grief has its own exigencies. We can never tell beforehand for whom we will feel grief.”

You can read his full article in The New Yorker here:

The musician Nick Cave in an interview to The New Yorker talks about grief:

“We have to be careful with that, because it drives people away. I mean that also on a professional level. Sadly, grief has its sell-by date, to some degree—not to the person who is grieving but to other people. We are expected to just get on with things. One of the reasons I keep doing “The Red Hand Files,” week after week, is that people often write in to talk about losing someone and the very real pain they’re in. . . . I’m sorry, this is quite difficult for me to talk about. Suddenly, you realize, Hang on, the person they are mourning died, like, fifteen years ago. It is extremely moving.

Because grief doesn’t just go away. You become more resilient; you become more effective at navigating and dealing with your feelings. Yet the fundamental loss remains—it doesn’t just dissipate—and, in a strange way, I think it can become a magnet for other losses. We come to see we are all simply creatures carrying around our ever-deepening loss. Small griefs seem to collect around the bigger primary grief. I think this realization allows us to become a true human being.

And I don’t think this situation resolves itself as you grow older. In fact, more people just die. Loss becomes the primary condition of living. That doesn’t mean you’re in a hopeless, grief-stricken state all the time; it just means that you carry a deeper understanding of what it is to be human. We suffer as human beings, but out of that can come enormous joys, and genuine happiness, too. It can run in tandem with this ordinary sense of suffering. Otherwise, joy doesn’t resonate fully. Joy seems to leap forth out of suffering. Regardless of your loss, you see how beautiful, how meaningful, how joyful the world can suddenly be. Human beings in general, you know, are fleeting things. That’s something to understand on a fundamental level. That we have value. That we are precious.”

You can read the full interview here:

When psychotherapist Megan Devine — creator of the excellent resource Refuge in Grief and author of its portable counterpart, It’s OK That You’re Not OK: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn’t Understand — watched her young, healthy partner drown, the sudden and senseless loss suspended her world. This video talks about how you can help your grieving friend who has recently suffered a catastrophic loss and the lessons she learned from her grief:

4) Failure/Rejection: You can never achieve anything worthwhile in life without failing. No matter how cautious you are going to fail. Failure will hit you hard. Suddenly the whole self image that you have built until now will crash. It is not good for your ego or your self worth but sometimes it is just the tough medicine that the patient needs. It gives you an opportunity to start over in a more intelligent fashion. It allows you to view a problem from a perspective that wasn't clear before. Sometimes failure also brings along with insight and clarity which just wasn't there earlier.

To understand how tough rejection can be ask someone who has just been rejected from a job interview or ask a grad student who has just been rejected from his dream university or ask a person whose offer for a marriage has been declined or ask a student who has just failed by one mark or an athlete who missed crossing the finishing line by a millisecond.

Here is the wonderful commencement speech where she talks about failure:

Trevor Noah wrote this wonderful passage on failure in his book Born a Crime :

"We spend so much time being afraid of failure, afraid of rejection. But regret is the thing we should fear most. Failure is an answer. Rejection is an answer. Regret is an eternal question you will never have the answer to.”

5) Disappointment: People will let you down. Friends and people close to you will betray you and there are not many things you can do about it. You have to be ready to let go of negative people, negative emotions and negative feelings. You have to align your expectations with reality.

Some people always feel disappointed because they haven't been able to live up to the exacting standards that they have set for themselves. People accept other people's definition of what success is and how they should lead their lives. This leads to even more disappointment. We are always comparing ourselves with our fictional perfect self. Television and movies have set unrealistic expectations of what life is supposed to be like. But real life is tough and real life is not as interesting as life portrayed on screen.

Here is a wonderful quote on disappointment by Jodi Picoult:

“It was one thing to make a mistake; it was another thing to keep making it. I knew what happened when you let yourself get close to someone, when you started to believe they loved you: you'd be disappointed. Depend on someone, and you might as well admit you're going to be crushed, because when you really needed them, they wouldn't be there. Either that, or you'd confide in them and you added to their problems. All you ever really had was yourself, and that sort of sucked if you were less than reliable.”

Donna Tartt put it beautifully in her book The Goldfinch:

“Well—I have to say I personally have never drawn such a sharp line between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ as you. For me: that line is often false. The two are never disconnected. One can’t exist without the other. As long as I am acting out of love, I feel I am doing best I know how. But you—wrapped up in judgment, always regretting the past, cursing yourself, blaming yourself, asking ‘what if,’ ‘what if.’ ‘Life is cruel.’ ‘I wish I had died instead of.’ Well—think about this. What if all your actions and choices, good or bad, make no difference to God? What if the pattern is pre-set? No no—hang on—this is a question worth struggling with. What if our badness and mistakes are the very thing that set our fate and bring us round to good? What if, for some of us, we can’t get there any other way?”

Matt Haig put it beautifully in his book Notes on a Nervous Planet:

6) Isolation/Loneliness: This is one of the most difficult things to deal with. People will come and go. You are the only constant in your life. I think connecting with another human being is one of the most beautiful experience that any human being can ever have. Ultimately we all want to feel connected with our partner, with our friends, with our jobs. We all are waiting to feel alive.

Isn't it ironic that in this age of technology people are more lonely than ever before in human history.

Haruki Murakami put it beautifully in his book Sputnik Sweetheart: “Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?”

Olivia Laing puts it beautifully in her book The Lonely City: “What does it feel like to be lonely? It feels like being hungry: like being hungry when everyone around you is readying for a feast. It feels shameful and alarming, and over time these feelings radiate outwards, making the lonely person increasingly isolated, increasingly estranged. It hurts, in the way that feelings do, and it also has physical consequences that take place invisibly, inside the closed compartments of the body. It advances, is what I’m trying to say, cold as ice and clear as glass, enclosing and engulfing.”

Aldous Huxley put it beautifully: “In spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. The essential substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable, locked up in the impenetrable strong-room of the individual soul and body. Our life is a sentence of perpetual solitary confinement.”

Haruki Murakami put it beautifully in his book The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: “But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathe, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four o'clock in the morning.”

Janet Fitch put it beautifully in her book White Oleander: "Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. An intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you'll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way."

Haruki Murakami put it beautifully in his book Sputnik Sweetheart: “And it came to me then. That we were wonderful traveling companions but in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal in their own separate orbits. From far off they look like beautiful shooting stars, but in reality they're nothing more than prisons, where each of us is locked up alone, going nowhere. When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we'd be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing.”

Sylvia Plath put it beautifully in her book The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath: "God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of "parties" with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter - they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship - but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering."

Olivia Laing puts it beautifully in her book The Lonely City: “Something funny happens to people who are lonely. The lonelier they get, the less adept they become at navigating social currents. Loneliness grows around them, like mould or fur, a prophylactic that inhibits contact, no matter how badly contact is desired. Loneliness is accretive, extending and perpetuating itself. Once it becomes impacted, it isn’t easy to dislodge.”

Philip Roth puts it beautifully in his book American Pastoral: “Yes, alone we are, deeply alone, and always, in store for us, a layer of loneliness even deeper. There is nothing we can do to dispose of that. No, loneliness shouldn’t surprise us, as astonishing to experience as it may be. You can try yourself inside out, but all you are then is inside out and lonely instead of inside in and lonely. My stupid, stupid Merry dear, stupider even that your stupid father, not even blowing up buildings helps. It’s lonely if there are buildings and it’s lonely if there are buildings and it’s lonely if there are no buildings. There is no protest to be lodged against loneliness⎯not all the bombing campaigns in history have made a dent in it. The most lethal of manmade explosives can’t touch it. Stand in awe not of Communism, my idiot child, but of ordinary, everyday loneliness.”

7) Reconciliation with the past & Responsibility of the present: I always feel guilty of not doing better in my past. You need to make peace with your own past. One of the most difficult thing to master in life is your mind. Your mind can be your greatest friend or your greatest enemy. It always wonders in the past and is anxious about the future. One of the most difficult thing a person has to do in life is to accept responsibility for his actions.

James Robertson puts it beautifully in his book And the Land Lay Still: "Most people go through life a wee bit disappointed in themselves. I think we all keep a memory of a moment when we missed someone or something, when we could have gone down another path, a happier or better or just a different path. Just because they're in the past doesn't mean you can't treasure the possibilities maybe we put down a marker for another time. And now's the time. Now we can do whatever we want to do."

Haruki Murakami puts it beautifully in his book Kafka On The Shore: “Every one of us is losing something precious to us. Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back. That's part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads - at least that's where I imagine it - there's a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in awhile, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases. In other words, you'll live forever in your own private library.”

8) Widespread Sexism: It is extremely tough especially for women who are mistreated or denied certain opportunities just because of their gender and not because of competence/merit.

Mahatma Gandhi put it beautifully "Of all the evils for which man has made himself responsible, none is so degrading, so shocking or so brutal as his abuse of the better half of humanity; the female sex."

Mahatma Gandhi put it beautifully in To the Women of India(Young India, Oct. 4, 1930) “To call woman the weaker sex is a libel; it is man's injustice to woman. If by strength is meant brute strength, then, indeed, is woman less brute than man. If by strength is meant moral power, then woman is immeasurably man's superior. Has she not greater intuition, is she not more self-sacrificing, has she not greater powers of endurance, has she not greater courage? Without her, man could not be. If nonviolence is the law of our being, the future is with woman. Who can make a more effective appeal to the heart than woman?"