During our journey through life, we sometimes feel disheartened by the pains of yesterday and the strains of today. The pains of yesterday are all the past reversals that had punctured our morale. The strains of today are all the present obstacles that are deflating our morale. How can we maintain our spirits in such situations?

Gita wisdom encourages us by expanding our definition of gains in life’s journey. We are souls meant to rejoice eternally in a loving relationship with Krishna. So from the perspective of our eternal identity, anything that brings us closer to him is a gain, even if it is a total loss at the material level. By this broadened understanding, we see that all our past pains were gains because they contributed to the experiences that brought us to him. And even the present strains can be gains if we use them as spurs to go closer to him.

Gita wisdom offers us this profoundly positive outlook towards life not just at a conceptual level but also at a practical level. When we serve Krishna lovingly, he gifts us the dynamic intelligence by which we can integrate and utilize yesterday’s pains and today’s strains into our devotional growth pathway so that they become tomorrow’s gains. This special Krishna-bestowed intelligence, which the Bhagavad-gita (10.10) calls as buddhi-yoga, enables us to act in ways that the burdensome situations go materially, while we grow spiritually.

When we thus see that we can succeed and are in fact succeeding at the spiritual level, then the sense of burden caused by the dreary material situation dissipates from our heart. Thus energized, we act to the best of our capacity even at the material level and thereby increase the possibility of succeeding at that level too.