I've heard it said:

For every door that closes, another opens.

And:

Turn every stumbling block into a stepping stone.

Not to mention the old standard:

Every dark cloud has a silver lining.

But I prefer (and I believe that I made this up, but given the current state of my memory which I seem to recall having been told is not good but frankly I cannot remember whether or not this is the case, I cannot say this with authority):

When life gives you lemons, find somebody you despise and squirt them in the eye.

I must say that I really major-league resent people who try to suggest that MS brings something positive into your life like it makes you a better person, or makes you stop and sniff the roses or something equally trite. What complete and utter blithering nonsense. That's like saying "When your stock portfolio crashes, at least you can save money by using the stock certificates to wallpaper the bathroom". Give me a break. MS may have brought some positive things into my life, but they sure are insignificant compared to the negative things. When my 10-year old daughter mourned the loss of some of the things we used to do together, I tried to reassure her about the positive things that have resulted from my MS. For example, when I take my 30-minute walk in the cool of the evenings she gets to come along with me and we talk as we walk, something that we seldom used to do. It's true of course, but I feel like I'm using the first of Bob Heinlein's Artistic Ways of Lying. (The first is to tell the truth but not all of it, and the second is to tell the truth but in such a way that nobody believes it.) What I didn't tell her was that I think I would have gotten more karma if I had gotten to choose to do that instead of being forced to do so by circumstances.

I also tend to see red when I read the same kind of nonsense written by people who have MS themselves. I've read it in those uplifting magazines with glossy covers paid for by drug companies (all together kids, can you say "Conflict of Interest") and on those depressing online bulletin boards where MS suffers who can't hold down jobs go online to trade upbeat platitudes, play religious one-upmanship, bitch about how little money they get on SSD (Social Security Disability) or how Hubby has as much empathy as a dead rat with a frontal lobotomy. Every now and then some poor woman will say something monumentally stupid about how MS has made them a more sympathetic, enlightened person, and how she wouldn't want to give up having MS in her life. I've got bad news for you, honey. That means you were a jerk before you got MS. Why did it take MS to turn you from a loser into some semblance of a real person? Are you just so lame? If your husband has no empathy for you, then it means that he's a jerk too. And what does that say about you? You married him. You know what they say about marriage, don't you?

• A woman marries a man thinking she can make him change. But he never does.
• A man marries a woman thinking that she'll never change. But she always does.

You can be cheerful about this if you can spare the energy for a mental exercise. It means that women are thinking positively about the future when they commit to marriage. You can also say that men are more practical, they're living in the present as the Zen Masters exhort us to do. But being realistic, it means that both groups are being delusional. Have the wellspouse read The MS Perspective Kit, and if (s)he still doesn't get it, show him/her the door and how to use it.

I've also read the "God doesn't give us any more than we can bear" kind of quote with my teeth gritted. I'm not sure where that one started. Marcus Aurelius said something along those lines before two of the Big Three Middle-Eastern religions became household names. Only he didn't say "God", he said "The Universe". I guess he's not a deist. Enough with the platitudes, folks. I don't know about you, but if I were in charge of the Universe, I'd find a much better route to Enlightenment than through pain and suffering. If there is an afterlife, if there is a Creator and if we get a personal interview with him/her/it, I'm going to have a few unkind words to say. This Universe is poorly designed, the tech support sucks, and the manual is incomprehensible. The first words out of my mouth - or whatever orifice we are going to be given to speak with the Creator - are going to be "What about the CHILDREN?" Why did you make it so they suffer so much? And the animals too? I mean, I can handle pain and suffering, but you'd better have a damn good explanation why you inflicted it on so many creatures who are ill-equipped to handle it because you didn't give them the defense mechanisms to cope with. On my planet, "people" like you are called sadists and monsters.

The only positive thing I have to say about MS happened one Summer when I vacationed with my family in Cape May, a pleasant Victorian beach town on the Southern tip of New Jersey. Like a typical doofus male, I was sloppy with the sunblock and neglected to apply it to my ears and along the edge of my hairline and as a result got terribly, horribly, glow-in-the-dark red sunburned in those areas. And I didn't feel a thing.

Another aphorism that comes into my mind as I try to deal with MS is:

Life wasn't meant to be easy.

I remember the former Prime Minister of Australia, Malcolm Fraser, saying this in Parliament in response to an opposition member's statement that Mal's politics weren't making life easy for the poor. When I lived in Australia we used to have a rider to this saying:

Life wasn't meant to be easy. But it wasn't meant to be this hard.