Maulana Wahiduddin Khan | Principles of Life | Al-Risala September, 1987
The rose is so beautiful that it has been called the queen of flowers. Yet, on the very same branch where the rose blooms so prettily, there is a formidable array of thorns which make it a difficult and sometimes painful business to pluck the rose. But such is the law of nature. There is no rose without its thorns.
The prick which the thorn gives us is a valuable reminder that there are many seemingly attractive propositions in life which have their difficult or unpleasant sides and that if we are to gain whatever is attractive or advantageous in any such situation, we must be prepared to accept and deal with its untoward elements. We cannot separate the rose from its thorns; we have to take the two together.
If we seek advantages, we must also be prepared for setbacks. Success in life means winning through despite severe hindrances and outright failures. There can be no progress without the urge to press forward in the face of all obstacles. Anyone who wishes to achieve anything at all in life has to resign himself to being the loser at some point in his career. It is seldom that there can be profit without there being loss at some time or another.
A few days ago, I dropped my spectacles, and the lenses broke. The floor they fell on was made of stone, and so fragile a thing as glass could naturally not withstand the shock of hitting so hard a substance. Had I been standing on an earthen floor, perhaps my glasses would not have broken. As it was, the hard floor underfoot had left me with a pair of useless spectacles dangling in my hands. This was a sharp reminder of how so many of our choices provide us with something we consider of great concrete value and also, sometimes, of great and wonderful beauty, only to leave us with something belonging to a different scale of values hopelessly shattered and of no further use to us. This is so often a feature of everyday life that we must – if we are to go forward – prepare ourselves to face such eventualities, accept them, and then press on regardless of them. We must simply learn to take the rough with the smooth.