I am grateful for the paths that didn’t lead where I wanted them to but instead led me to somewhere better.

Hindsight is the only place this sentence works, and it's worth being careful about applying it forward. *It'll work out for the best* is fine to notice afterward and poor to say to someone standing in the wreckage.

Looking back, though, the pattern usually holds. The job you didn't get, the person who ended it — a good deal of what you'd now call your life came in through those particular doors.

What that history buys you isn't optimism exactly. It's tolerance for not knowing yet.

Something is currently not going your way. You are not in a position to grade it.