There are multiple lenses through which we might view a situation. Some are more helpful than others.
When we experience hardships, we could focus on our pain or annoyance. Or we could see them as part of a larger story.
For many generations, there was a practice of "offering up" the difficulties that we experienced each day.1 While I still see value in the practice, the devotion is less common today than it once was.
If offering it up does not work for you, I "offer" an alternative: frame your discomforts as part of an adventure.
We hunger for adventure. Seeing some of the difficulties we face as stepping stones in a larger adventure tends to take the sting out of our hardships and annoyances.
I recently had a five-hour immersion in the notorious Italian bureaucracy. Seeing it as part of my adventure of living in Rome changed the entire experience.
Adventure doesn't have to involve physical challenges or traveling to an exotic location. It often looks traditional: Follow Jesus Christ. Commit to someone until death do you part. Raise a family.
Any significant commitment will come with difficulties, but when we see them within a larger framework, we're not focused on the hardship.
We get to have an adventure.
Pope Benedict XVI explains: “There used to be a form of devotion—perhaps less practiced today but quite widespread not long ago—that included the idea of ‘offering up’ the minor daily hardships that continually strike at us like irritating ‘jabs’, thereby giving them a meaning. Of course, there were some exaggerations and perhaps unhealthy applications of this devotion, but we need to ask ourselves whether there may not after all have been something essential and helpful contained within it. What does it mean to offer something up? Those who did so were convinced that they could insert these little annoyances into Christ's great “com-passion” so that they somehow became part of the treasury of compassion so greatly needed by the human race. In this way, even the small inconveniences of daily life could acquire meaning and contribute to the economy of good and of human love. Maybe we should consider whether it might be judicious to revive this practice ourselves.”