When you feel wretched, read this — morning meditation

What is a morning meditation? To help me build a habit of daily writing, I’m publishing a few thoughts here every morning about ideas that interest and inspire me, mostly drawn from ordinary life. I hope you enjoy them.
Pema Chodron is one of my favorite writers and thinkers of all-time. I often return to her when I’m feeling sad, discouraged, uncertain, or pretty much any other of the challenging emotions that inevitably arise as part of this human life.
Today, I’d like to share a quote from her book Start Where You Are, one of the few paper books I still own. If you’re struggling with some of the more wretched aspects of being alive (aren’t we all, in some way or other?), I hope these words comfort you as much as they have comforted me:
Life is glorious, but life is also wretched. It is both. Appreciating the gloriousness inspires us, encourages us, cheers us up, gives us a bigger perspective, energizes us. We feel connected. But if that’s all that’s happening, we get arrogant and start to look down on others, and there is a sense of making ourselves a big deal and being really serious about it, wanting it to be like that forever. The gloriousness becomes tinged by craving and addiction. On the other hand, wretchedness — life’s painful aspect — softens us up considerably. Knowing pain is a very important ingredient of being there for another person. When you are feeling a lot of grief, you can look right into somebody’s eyes because you feel you haven’t got anything to lose — you’re just there. The wretchedness humbles us and softens us, but if we were only wretched, we would all just go down the tubes. We’d be so depressed, discouraged, and hopeless that we wouldn’t have enough energy to eat an apple. Gloriousness and wretchedness need each other. One inspires us, the other softens us. They go together.
