Suffering is bullsh*t
When you look back at the most fruitful moments of your life years from now, you’ll be surprised to discover how many of them unfolded amid a big loss or a crisis or in the face of a giant unknown.
Heather Havrilesky • Tolerating Unknowns Will Make You Stronger
“I have come to see the profound value of taking in the whole landscape of life and not rejecting or denying what we are given. I have also learned that our waywardness, difficulties, and 'crises' might not be terminal obstacles. They can actually be gateways to wider, richer internal and external landscapes. If we willingly investigate our difficu... See more
Dan Shipper / Superorganizers • You Grow from Your Edges
Keely Adler and added
My experiences have been that my own suffering has turned out to be grace and that I often see other people’s suffering as grace even though they don’t see it that way, but I don’t say to them “it’s grace.” Because for them it’s suffering so I do what I can to relieve that suffering, but at the same moment my understanding that they will gain wisdo
... See moreRachael • Viewing Suffering as Grace
There is a way, with moderate moral imagination and considerable countercultural courage, to subvert this tendency without turning away from the reality and magnitude of suffering that we do live with — a way to esteem in attention and admiration not the unluckiness of what has happened to us but the luckiness that, despite it, we have become the p... See more
Maria Popova • The Good Luck of Your Bad Luck: Marcus Aurelius on the Stoic Strategy for Weathering Life’s Waves and Turning Suffering into Strength
Yufa and added
Suffering is a moment of clarity, when you can no longer deny the truth of a situation and are forced into uncomfortable change. I’m lucky that I didn’t get everything I wanted in my life, or I’d be happy with my first good job, my college sweetheart, my college town. Being poor when young led to making money when old. Losing faith in my bosses and
... See moreTimothy Ferriss • Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World
But sometimes, when suffering can be connected to a larger narrative of change and redemption, we can suffer our way to wisdom. This is the kind of wisdom you can’t learn from books; you have to experience it yourself. Sometimes you experience your first taste of nobility in the way you respond to suffering.
David Brooks • The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life
But sometimes, when suffering can be connected to a larger narrative of change and redemption, we can suffer our way to wisdom. This is the kind of wisdom you can’t learn from books; you have to experience it yourself. Sometimes you experience your first taste of nobility in the way you respond to suffering.
David Brooks • The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life
We suffer as human beings, but out of that can come enormous joys, and genuine happiness, too. It can run in tandem with this ordinary sense of suffering. Otherwise, joy doesn’t resonate fully. Joy seems to leap forth out of suffering. Regardless of your loss, you see how beautiful, how meaningful, how joyful the world can suddenly be. Human beings... See more
Amanda Petrusich • Nick Cave on the Fragility of Life
Rob Tourtelot added