Wednesday, August 1, 2012

Hope In Suffering



    Life is not easy, you will face many tragedies throughout your time here on Earth, there will be times where your throat will ache from so much crying and your stomach will churn from hiccuping, your mind will race and everything will feel lost, like you are falling down a never ending hole, with no one there to aid you, at these moments there is one feeling that continually purveys your mind, “Why me? What have I done?” Many have sought to find quick solutions to these issues, some have written books on it: “10 steps to getting over this moment”, “5 steps to getting your life together”, “3 easy steps to get you smiling again”, but in the end of the day all these exercises only teach you how to brush your problems aside. It’s as if all of them really should be titled “How to forget your troubles and pretend you are happy”. 


     Life is tough, I’m not here to tell you it’s not and that there are easy steps to making it easier to bare, what this post is trying to teach is that sometimes true living comes from embracing life to its fullest instead of ignoring the negative aspects you generally try to ignore and forget. This journey isn’t an easy one, it in fact is the toughest journey you’ll ever have to go through but it will be the most meaningful journey you’ll ever undertake, this is not a three-step process but a very real way to deal with pain and suffering, stick with me on this, even if you disagree, read this post to the end and maybe, if nothing else, you’ll get a new insight into your life which might aid matters for you in the future. 


    When going through despair, true fear, there is no answer or book or advice that can help you forget what you are going through. Everyone on this Earth will find themselves at this point sometime in their lives. When you reach this point stop what you are doing, take a deep breath, and take in the situation, take in everything that is going on and embrace the suffering that is going on around you, cry as much as you need, truly allow yourself to suffer, through this you will begin to face the darkness around you. It is through an understanding of what true suffering is that one can come to an understanding of what true happiness is, you cannot have happiness without suffering or love without hate, you cannot have a complete understanding of how the world works if you do not allow yourself to come to a concrete understanding of what darkness is, it is through this experience that your life will be changed forever. 


    After embracing suffering something interesting begins to occur in your life, you begin to see the world in a different light and you are presented with a choice, you can either choose to stay in the muck of your own suffering or you can choose to look around yourself and see the light around you. It is while we are in the dark that we truly see the light that is around us, only when you have come to an understanding of what suffering feels like can you come to an understanding of what joy feels like, before this moment your happy memories were on a superficial level but now after understanding despair those memories are treasures to hold on to, they are beacons of light in a dark world, by understanding suffering you will be able to look upon the blessings in your own life in a new light, as if everything has been magnified, you’ll come to appreciate the small things in life, the laughs with co-workers, the friends you have, the family that loves you, the career you possess, the dreams you long for, how blue the sky can be during the summer, everything will take on a new light, everything will shift and your world will never be the same. It is through embracing the reality of life that one can finally start living. By understanding our own finality, we begin to live anew, we see what was previously hidden to us and understand that there is good in our lives, that there are blessings all over and that there is more to this world than just despair and suffering. 


    Both the blindfold of negativity and eternal optimism are ways to live your life but they are missing key elements that allow you to truly existentially embrace life, the pessimist fails to see the blessings in life, the beauty in art, the love in relationships, never opening his eyes to the good around him but the eternal optimist fails to understand what true despair is and therefore can never understand what true love is, it is through an understanding of what suffering is that we learn about what love is, what happiness is. Think about it like this, it is only through having a cold that one can come to an understanding of what it means to be healthy, if you’ve never had a cold then you have no reference point to understanding what feeling healthy means. 


     This isn’t a post about the easy steps one can take in order to be happy, or in order to ignore your problems, this is an advice on how to really live, how to embrace life at its core, head on and push forward. It is through this embrace of life that you may come to a very real existential understanding of life, and through that begin to appreciate the raw moments of beauty around you, moments which were hidden to you previously but now are everywhere. Life is tough but it is also good, as a wise man once said “For everything there is a season…a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance…a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing… a time for love; and a time for hate”, it is through this existential embrace of life that you begin to live a full life, so go and start living.

   Love from your humble blogger,  

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