What Is The Hardest Part Of Life?
The quote above says it all — and not just physical health but also mental health struggles.
”Life is difficult” — so said M. Scott Peck in the very first sentence of his best-selling book “The Road Less Traveled.” He wasn’t wrong.
The number of challenges we face are about as many as the number of people there are on the planet. Far too long to list but some will come to mind immediately; people not returning our love for them, losing a pet, facing debt and mounting bills, technology not working or growing more confusing by the day, children misbehaving despite our best attempts at parenting. And on and on it goes.
But perspective can be grounding. Think of something relatively benign to the vast majority of us, but that most of us have had to deal with. Such as the flu. When you are bed ridden with zero energy for 10 days, those 1000 problems are mostly put on hold. There’s nothing you can do about them, and at least from personal experience, I’m not even thinking about them because I feel so miserable that I am simply trying to distract myself, and guessing how many more days I’ll be sick.
Almost all of us have suffered something similar to the above. But, with certainty, we also will all suffer through an ailment much more debilitating. Be it unexpectedly at a young age or as we hit our elder years, all of our problems will turn into one problem — something physical or psychological that puts everything else on hold. That prevents us from doing most anything we want.
There no solution but there is a silver lining and lesson to be learned. If you’re reading this, ideally you are not in that position and I want to share a story with you that I heard recently from journalist Sebastian Junger (whose life crashed around him to a singular 1 problem that resulted in a life-transformative near death experience).
The famous Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky was once jailed for being part of an intellectual group of friends known as the Petrashevsky Circle. Think of an online group today — a message board where you discuss politics and philosophy. They would speak about things such as theoretically freeing the serfs. Seemingly benign to us but not so much for many nations in 1840, and still sadly some today.
The Czar got wind of these discussions and decided the group should be imprisoned. After a relatively short time in jail, about 8 months, on December 22, of 1849 the members of the circle were marched outside thinking they were being freed. Rather than freedom, though, they were told they had been ordered to be killed by a firing squad. Almost immediately they had to make the transition of thinking they were going home — happily freed — but also perhaps back to some of those “1000 problems” to the one singular problem of their imminent death.
Dostoevsky stood in this group, waiting to be fired upon.
The guns were raised. Everyone awaited the command to fire were their entire bodies would be torn open by musket balls.
But it was all theatre. At the last second a rider came through exclaiming “the Czar frees you.”
What happened to Dostoevsky in that moment of just one ultimate problem; “I’m going to die in a minute ?” Dostoevsky looked up into the sky and gazed at the rays of sunshine glinting off the steeple of a church and thought to himself: “in sheer moments I’ll be part of the sunlight and I’ll be part of all things — and if I somehow survive this I’ll live the rest of my life trying to turn every moment into infinity.”
So many of these 1000 problems we have aren’t quite what we make them. In fact they may be gifts — think of how many unanswered wants or prayers we have wished for where years later we have been thankful they actually did not unfold. Think of the profound gratitude we can have for this life of infinite possibilities. Yes we will die one day. And possibly before that suffer disability. But that knowledge affords us perhaps the greatest gift we have been given as self-aware beings: what we do this day, what we do tomorrow, matters. To quote Brad Pitt’s character of Achilles in the movie ‘Troy’
“The gods envy us. They envy us because we’re mortal, because any moment may be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.”
Each of these moments — including our problems, are fleeting. “Everything ends” said Author Elizabeth Gilbert. We can embrace these moments as there is such amazing beauty in being in the present. On the sheer miracle of all that we have experienced, all that we are experiencing, and in the infinite that we will experience and are gifted to be a part of.
Life will bring us more than 1000 problems; more that 1000 joys. And that, I believe, is what the miracle of life really is. The fact that we get to experience them and do with them what we will while we have the freedom to live in this moment. To end, and to quote author and concentration camp survivor Viktor Frankel
“Between stimulus [imcluding problems] and response there is a space.
In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
I wish you the freedom of having the choice of how you handle the problems you are facing today. Because those problems mean you are present, you are boundless, and you are alive in this miracle of consciousness and life. And I hope, in the above, some of our 1000 problems are diminished.