Why does everything have to be so hard
The world is going to hell in a handbasket!
What’s wrong with everyone?
When am I ever going to get a break?!?
Sound familiar?
It’s human nature to wish we lived a life free from pain and difficulty. On one hand, who wouldn’t want to eliminate the circumstances that cause us unhappiness, stress, even despair? When we’re going through tough times, often it’s tough just to imagine the relief we’ll feel when the tough times are over. In some cases, it feels like stress is a perpetual state- the norm, doesn’t it?
All it takes is a few minutes perusing the news or social media and one is almost overwhelmed with the amount of chaos happening around our globe. A sense of helplessness can settle in and overtake without a shift in perspective to counterbalance the idea that doom lurks around every corner.
Yet there is another perspective- one that is vital to embrace in order to believe that our pain exists for a beneficial reason.
Recently I read an outstanding book titled, The Book of Joy, written by His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu (with Douglas Abrams). In one of the chapters, these two hugely influential leaders, who often have very different perspectives, are having a discussion about the life of the late Nelson Mandela, specifically about his post-prison success.
Following his release and his subsequent election as the first President of a free South Africa, Mandela asked the Archbishop to put together a coalition whose purpose was to ‘find a peaceful way to confront the atrocities of apartheid and pioneer a new future without revenge and retribution’.
When reflecting on this commission from Mandela, the Archbishop when on to say, “In a paradoxical way, it is how we face all the things that seem to be negative in our lives that determine the kind of person we become. If we regard all of this as frustrating, we’re going to come out squeezed and tight and wishing to smash everything.”
In essence, what Tutu is saying is that it’s this same painful experiences- and how we choose to respond to them, that determines the quality of our lives. Without choosing to learn from them and move forward, we remain stuck in a headset of bitterness and unresolved internal conflict that create barriers that can seem insurmountable.
Continuing further in this same chapter in the book, I was amazed to read that this idea that nothing beautiful comes without some measure of pain, is indeed biological in its origin.
Prenatal researcher, Pathik Wadhwa, found that ‘stress and opposition turn out to be exactly what initiate our development in utero. Our stem cells do not differentiate and become us if there is not enough biological stress to encourage them to do so. Without stress and opposition, complex life like ours would never have developed. We would never have come into being.’
Fascinating!
I don’t share these stories to imply that ‘life is hard- get over it and move on.’ Quite the contrary. Life IS hard. Yet without our difficulties, we would have no real-life laboratory to discover what we’re capable of as human beings. In fact, it’s these very circumstances that often have us at our wits’ end where we find that, with a shift in perspective, we become stronger, and are one more step closer to living into our unlimited potential.
Perspective is a choice.
And all of us get to choose.
I encourage you to choose a perspective that serves you, and others.
It IS your superpower.
