Face it; life's gonna chew you up and spit you out. If you're lucky you'll get stuck to the bottom of someone's shoe and be carried far, far away from it all.

If you feel like a nearly-drowned rat that’s been dragged through the mud, all twisted up inside your mother’s borrowed, prized quilt, having been tossed about by gale force winds that managed to entangle you in barbed wire one-thousand miles from your goal in the middle of a hot, barren nowhere void of any basic necessities―then congratulations! You’re no observer but an actual participant in the game of life! Stand up and keep living.

You may think you've hit rock bottom in your life but guess what—there's more crud underneath those rocks.

I believe the main purpose of life is to accept with gratitude what you've been blessed with so that you may use those gifts to mold yourself into the best person you can possibly be. Learning to discern things of true value from those of little or no worth is part of the process.

Sometimes it feels as if God set you on Earth with a bottle full of nasty-tasting pills called days and these instructions: Swallow one at a time. When entire prescription is finished, you may return home.

Life is a book that someone else is reading—and you, a key character—hence the need for continual conflict and resolution. We can't have any boring books.

Maybe there is no such thing as success—a final destination where you arrive once and for all. Maybe existence is a never-ending journey of peaks and valleys and forever chasing dreams.

Life isn't a lazy cruise on some endless, calm, and temperate sea. Life is a raging ocean with swells and tidal waves that wreck and sink your boat. Life is a series of storms―overcast skies, fierce winds, and pelting rain. You were meant to be immersed in it all―first to float, then swim, and eventually to walk on water.

Life is just repeated attempts at trying to do better.