A wise person once said to me, “Happiness requires struggle!” If I asked you, “What do you want out of life?” and you say something like, “I want to be happy, have a great family and a job I like. I want to fall in love and have amazing relationships, to look perfect and make money, or be well-respected and be a total diva to the point that people part like the Red Sea when I walk into a room.”
Such a desire is so ubiquitous and fleeting that it doesn’t even mean anything. To illustrate this, I asked a couple during a counselling session, “How do you choose to suffer in this relationship?” They immediately focussed their gaze at me in shock as if I had asked a stupid question. But I asked, because any honest answer or reaction to such a question tells me far more about a person’s life and potential than their desires and fantasies. Hence, a more profiting question to consider is — What pain do I want in my life? What am I willing to struggle for? Such questions seem to be greater determinants of how our lives turn out eventually. Whereas everybody wants to have an amazing life and financial independence, not everyone wants to suffer through long-hour work weeks, long travels, obnoxious paperwork, and a ‘hell-like’ work life.
Everybody wants to have an awesome relationship—but not everyone is willing to go through the tough conversations, the awkward silences, the hurt feelings, and the emotional psychodrama to get there. People want an amazing physique. But they forget that you don’t end up with one unless you appreciate the pain and stress that comes with living inside a gym for hour upon hour, or unless you love calculating and calibrating the food you eat, and planning your life on tiny plate-sized portions.
Most of us, even so-called bible believing Christians, view pain and sacrifice as objectively negative things to be avoided at all costs (Read Matt 16:24-26). At a Resilience Course, I learnt that we are all capable of, and I add, responsible for ascribing meaning to our pain, and this is a path to give our life purpose. The positive is the side effect of handling the negative. You can only avoid negative experiences for so long before they come roaring back at you. Positive experience is easy to handle. It is negative experience that we all, by definition, struggle with.
Therefore, what we get out of life is not determined by the ubiquitous and fleeting good feelings we desire, but by what bad feelings we are willing and able to sustain to get us to those good feelings. What determines your success isn’t “What you enjoy doing but what pain you are willing to endure. The quality of your life is not determined by the quality of your positive experiences, but more by the quality of your negative experiences. And to get successful at dealing with negative experiences is to get successful at dealing with life.
Therefore, my advice is simple but deep, “If you want the benefits of something in life, you have to also want the costs, which is not yours to fix by the way”. Just think of your relationships, business or spiritual life, if you find yourself wanting something month after month, year after year, yet nothing happens and you never come any closer to it, then maybe what you actually want is a fantasy, an idealization, an image, a false promise. Maybe what you want isn’t what you want or need— you just enjoy wanting.
Maybe you are the man who confessed, “I wanted the reward and not the struggle. I wanted the result and not the process. I was in love not with the fight, but only the victory. I thought I wanted something, but it turns out I didn’t.” End of story!
*May Your Week Not Be Weak, But With Him. I Send You My Prayerful Wishes For The Week. From: Fr.Ray@acc.gh*
