Is emotional pain necessary?
Yes.
Is it constructive?
Yes.
Is it avoidable?
Never.
Yet, most of the time we don’t only try to to keep it from happening, but we attach a certain amount of “wrongness” to it.
But if we could just learn to know how heavy it is to who we become, I think we’d become more of what we want if we could just look at suffering in the face and fucking smile at it…
…
I appreciate this struggle — this incessant and ridiculous intensity.
This self-chosen truth to take what we desire and give ourselves to it in a way that dissolves all distractions; to release ourselves from what we think is the hold of worldly expectations.
Also, I hate it…
The idea of the almost masochistic mindset it takes to endure our challenges is something I’m beginning to understand, but still have a hard time soaking up.
All for the sake of an undeveloped dream. Something that we have no proof is going to happen, and something we may not even be sure is right for us.
Is there a purpose to it?
What does it do to the successful people that seem to be changed by it?
Why is struggle so extreme for one and so trivial for another?
It’s choice.
It’s acceptance of knowing what it takes.
It seeing that we dramatize it so deeply, we make it seem impossible to face.
…
What baffles me is that for whatever reason, it means something.
And what I’ve learned from the importance of suffering, is that we have to choose to face it….and not everyone is willing.
It can defeat us.
I’ve quit so many times, I can’t even count them.
And there’s no proof of who will win, you or the unforgiving suffering. There’s also no proof of how consistently one will win either because the game never ends.
To overcome anything is just realizing you have to face the next level of it — it’s older brother.
One mountain peak gets you just high enough to see another.
And that’s what suffering is:
The continuation.
The climb to the temporary landing before the turn toward the next climb.
The understanding and resilience of suffering itself and finding what it is about our subjective reality that helps us overcome it.
…
Looking at suffering through a new lens with the same mission is crucial.
As I’ve continued in life and craft…and repeatedly threatened to quit in my hard moments…I’ve noticed a thought that repeatedly comes back to me. Something that so fleetingly escapes my grasp, but in the moment clears up my vision of self and life almost entirely.
It’s this thought that if I can love only what matters to me, if I can disregard what I think I must do for society, if I can remove the pressure of doing things for the sake of success and focus more cleanly on the help I can give myself, I all of a sudden can see life as this epic potential of choice.
Beautiful choice.
The relief of choice.
I can see the freedom at the moment to drastically change my trajectory, almost in spite of a world that tells me I can’t.
If such thoughts exist, despite their scarcity, don’t they also have just as much power to influence me as the overwhelming thoughts of inferiority, inadequacy, and confusion?
…
How important is the intensity?
How is it that we can so easily give ourselves to the comfort and numbness of life over the intensity of it?
If we, at our foundations of understanding, have this inherent knowing that we want a highly receptive and visceral experience, how do we so easily feel overwhelmed by it?
How do we give it up so easily?
Could it be because of the imbalance of our experience’s “negative” to “positive” ratio?
And if that is the case, what makes it so? What creates the negative and positive of anything?
Is it our emotions?
Is it the undeniable chaos that the world has found itself in?
Is the world far more balanced than we so subjectively perceive it to be?
If the world has more good, more amazement, more potential than we like to admit, then wouldn’t that mean that it’s only us that keeps us from the feelings that we so deeply desire?
If we could delete the world in the sense of what takes our attention, wouldn’t we then be changing the formula?
Couldn’t we choose — or at least more ideally choose — our suffering? And maybe in choosing our suffering, we can feel more power in our influence; the one of ourselves and the one on others.
Then couldn’t it be that we could justify our pain?
We would be consciously knowing from that point that we’ve chosen a life, and are not enduring only what is given to us.
Then maybe we could understand the importance of pain.
Maybe we could see that the chosen pain and the intensity of that pain is worth feeling. Maybe we feel honored in life to be capable of facing it, overcoming it, and realizing life in a deeper sense only when we are past it.
…
No matter what we try to avoid, life is suffering…
But I think the only suffering that is necessary is the version of it that comes from our fight to face the world; a suffering only existent in the fight itself.
The other suffering…
The one where it hurts to exist; to be actionless, to blindly live, to wonder if our purpose without attempting to find it, that suffering is what makes life unbearable.
We are angels.
Choosing to use our feathery extensions of self to fight the war against the unholy, omnipresent evil…
Or cutting off our wings in fear of having to face the war itself.
Destined to look up at those who chose to fly, to face the horrors of the fight, leaving us in a chosen but uneasy comfort of observation and secret enviousness.
It’s the choice between two types of suffering that makes us anything.
The choice to do our part, to face the devil.
Or
The choice to hide from others and ourselves, watching a world fall into the hands of darkness.
That’s always your choice.
Don’t ever think the world could or should make it for you.
Truth and Love, Reader.
…
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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