So I was thinking today about how there can’t be anything good without  bad.

It’s like a quote in a book that I really liked, I think it went something to the effect of “you cant see the light without a bit of shadow.”

That’s so true. Everything in life comes with both good and bad parts; you just have to take them together. And usually, we choose the situations for ourselves where the good outweighs the bad, hopefully by a lot.

Take my riding instructor for example. Its always so hard for me to explain to people about her, because from the things we said about her, people always thought she was some terrible witch. And truthfully, she did some pretty crappy stuff. But to be honest, there was so much good too.

Like the way our horses were dealt with. At times it felt, and to the girls who still have horses there, feels like the horses didn’t even belong to us. When they were hurt or sick, they were just treated, and often we weren’t even informed of it. Once Al foundered and I got yelled at for not coming to see him, when I had never even been told that anything was wrong. Amy had no idea that Licorice was sick until about 11 am and she had been colicking all night long. And that sucks.

But then again, where else could we go where the horses are loved so much? They treated the horses when they were sick. They loved them like they were their own. We still go back to hang out, even those of us who don’t have horses there anymore. And when Licorice was sick, MK drove her around in the trailer, monitered her all day, and drove her to Tufts at 8 pm. She cried as hard as the rest of us when Beano died, and then went back the next day alone to pick up her body. She arranged everything for her to be buried in the mare field so Amy didn’t have to see it, and stood next to the tractor while the guy set her down.

Where else do you find that? That’s a lot of good to go against the bad stuff.

When you draw something, the only way to make the light show up is by shading the rest in dark. Without that contrast the picture is flat. It’s the same with everything. We can’t appreciate the wonderful things without some bad stuff to compare it to.