 The gifts, the initiations that the universe, or whoever's in charge of it, give often take the form of something that looks really bad going into it, like divorce, illness, accident, a car accident, cancer, bankruptcy, losing your job. It comes in the form of a collapse. A collapse that isn't just a collapse in outward circumstances, but also could be a collapse of your own identity, because the outward circumstances are part of how we answer the question, who am I? So the marriage falls apart, or the career falls apart, and all of a sudden, like, wow, I don't even know who I am anymore. That emptiness is where something new can come in. And yeah, there's kind of a loss there. Sometimes looking back on it, though, I think, yeah, I was ready for that loss. It's what I needed. But that can't be an escape mechanism from feeling the full brunt of the calamity as it happens. If you try to say, oh, it's all meant to be, all is well, there's intelligence in all things, and this is happening for my benefit, but at some point it may very well intensify to the point where that just sounds like a pile of crap, and a bunch of spiritual bypass garbage, because those metaphysical beliefs can also be a way of keeping the transformation at arm's length, staying within a comfortable worldview, a comfortable spiritual paradigm.