No One Said Life Would be Easy
First remove the lie, then begin to live
This week’s Meditation at a glance:
A myth permeates our culture that life is filled with pleasure and comfort. Yet for a good majority of people, life is filled with constant struggle. This week, we examine the life of comfort and explore the struggle that is life.
There is often a misconception that life is supposed to be easy, or at the very least, not painful. But yet, if you look at the time period in which we live, you could see that we are living in one of the greatest times in the history of civilization.
The majority of our history was spent in a daily struggle for survival. You don’t even need to go back very far to see how much better off we are today than even 100 years ago.
Pain is something we look to avoid at all costs and yet, as the Buddhists have pointed out, when we begin to acknowledge that suffering is a core feature of life, it begins to get better.
Marcus Aurelius spends many entries within the Meditations reminding himself that the challenges he has to bear are in fact bearable, that he is a human, and therefore what he experiences is bearable as others too have been forced to bear them:
“Not to assume it's impossible because you find it hard. But to recognize that if it's humanly possible, you can do it too.”
The philosopher Michel de Montaigne set to remind himself of this same notion daily. In Montaigne’s tower where he spent his time studying, he had carved into one of the ceiling beams the famous Terence line of “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto”:
"I am human, and I think nothing human is alien to me."
We are all different yet the same. We will all struggle within this world, some far more than others. Is it fair that some are forced to struggle more than others? No, of course not, but it is unfortunately a fact of life. We will all struggle. We all have our own journeys. For the majority of us, we come into the world struggling and we leave the world struggling. Life is not easy, and it should never be promised as such.
Writing of this misconception of suffering in a world devoted pleasure and comfort, Nietzsche wrote:
“If you experience suffering and displeasure as evil, hateful, worthy of annihilation, and as a defect of existence, then it is clear that besides your religion of pity you also harbor another religion in your heart that is perhaps the mother of the religion of pity: the religion of comfortableness. How little you know of human happiness, you comfortable and benevolent people!”
It is fine to be comfortable, it is a goal we all look to achieve. But to fool ourselves and pretend like life holds no suffering, that we should be handed an easy and comfortable life, well, this is just a lie. Life will be uncomfortable at times. It will be hard. It will try and break you. It will try and break those you love. And this is our commonality. Life is a struggle and we struggle within it together.
When we begin to see this, when we begin to accept that the suffering does exist, that we and others will go through it, then it becomes easier to bear because we have removed the lie. We have also formed the bridge of compassion for those who are suffering because we too know the feeling and the struggle and are connected by it.
The world is filled with suffering, and it is no easy place, but we can always work to make it more bearable, and it starts with our own outlook on it.
Three Bullet Summary:
We live in a fantasy if we believe that life does not hold suffering
The majority of our lives contain suffering and when we admit this, we can begin to live a happy life
One core commonality amongst everyone is that we will suffer and struggle, it is what connects us, it is what binds us
Thank you again for reading and I hope you found this useful. Please feel free to heart, comment, or ask questions about this post. Suggestions are always appreciated and considered.
Until next week,
D.A. DiGerolamo