Struggle well

Life’s a struggle, right?  Many wise people identified it and offered solutions to it, from the Buddha to Scott Peck.  I have spent most of my adult life avoiding struggle, I have been working hard – you might say struggled – to avoid struggle and to just have things work without trouble.

And then one day, while grappling with something difficult I thought, what if I accept my struggle, just accept that this is what I am doing now? This question led to writing a list of areas that I did everything possible to avoid struggling with.  They are:

1. My relationships
2. Career
3. Finances
4. Family

I then decided to experiment and see what might happen if I let my struggle be more active. This is what I’ve learned and still am learning.  That although it sounds liberating not to have to have everything in life trouble-free, it is almost impossible to unlearn behaviour; once we know something we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it.  And that it’s difficult to share my knowledge with others, because I can’t re-create other people’s state of mind as much as they can’t re-cerate mine (that is what the existentialists call isolation – that no one, but us, can know our experience).

I think of one way to beat how I rely on previously gained knowledge (as in knowledge gained by my experience) and that is by expanding my experience.

Expanding experiences sounds vague, it’s like searching for something without knowing what that thing is; quite a challenge for anyone who wants clear answers, clear objectives and clear means to get there.

I believe we can try to do so if actively and ‘choicefully’ integrate another factor: that we can struggle.

There are many ways to deal with struggle, some people say we need to adopt a positive stance towards hardship and let it teach us a thing or two.  Others say that life’s good if we choose to see it as such, others say that struggle is all in our head and that we have a choice.  To me, it is accepting that I can struggle – life, reality, emotions and needs are so complex that there is no way things will always be trouble-free.  Believing otherwise means avoiding part of our existence.

And if this is so, then the best I can do is learn to struggle well.  Like any other behaviour, if I do it well, it becomes less of a threat, less something to avoid which multiplies my choices and therefore expands my experience.

Yours, Gilead

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