Thoughts on Struggle and Pain

A new day, and it's a struggle to get myself going. Like sprinting and running, I so badly don’t want to be here but so glad I am. It's funny how our brains work like that, resisting what we know is good for us. But I think that resistance is there for a purpose. The struggle gives a sense of meaning, of importance that we may not think is there otherwise. I don’t know why we equate struggle to meaning, why easy things shouldn’t be valued as much. I read Becca’s great essay about suffering from the perspective of a person with chronic pain and illness and there is this question of why we think pain and struggle brings meaning. We feel that we do but there is no fact in the matter. Correlation but no causation. 

Maybe it's because of the way we tell stories, or the fact stories are only told when there is a struggle. But that becomes a chicken or the egg situation and doesn’t dive into the why. Why is struggle so important to us? Why does it lack equal value? It's so ingrained in everything we do, from the way our economies work, to the religions we worship. Is it because life feels hard? Because our ancestors struggled and so we must too? Struggle is not even a good indicator of success, it's clear in the way that billionaires work. Their ventures and work goes so much farther, has so much more of an impact in the world, then mine could ever have in this lifetime. It's not from a lack of effort but resources. And resources are more often given than offered. 

So struggle doesn’t equal success and it doesn’t equal meaning. But it does give us something and guess that has to mean something to us even if it doesn’t. At the end of the day, it comes back to us, what we see before us and what we decide to do with it. Pain has no purpose except for the escape from it. It's the ghost that haunts us, that pushes us away. I don’t suffer from chronic pain the way so many do, (and this isn’t to equate my experience, just to express what I know) but every so often I find myself flat on my back with aching stomach cramps. When you are caught by the pain, when there is no escape from its clutches, when there is only toleration and waiting, I contemplate. I let my mind drift from thought to thought, riding the waves with no purpose. 

Purposeless. I wonder if it could be valued. 

Of course we can find purposelessness outside of pain, but there is something different in an immobile state. You will not find nirvana there, or change your world view. The struggle has no meaning. But there is a veil of peace. The struggle, the pain allows us to escape for a moment from the fear, the phantom of struggles and pain. Dive in, find a quiet in the eye of the storm. Maybe there is no meaning, there is no goal, maybe there is only a break.