Here is a prediction I am a hundred per cent certain of, and I'm willing to bet my last quarter's profits on it — you are about to experience some significant emotional pain in the coming months.
How do I know? Because suffering is an unavoidable component of our lives. I hate it, I hate that I know it, and I am afraid of knowing it, and still, today I'll pull myself together and try to explain the logic of suffering.
You begin your life in an almost perfect position that will never return: all your needs are supplied to you immediately, in abundance, and without your even having to speak or ask. They guess in advance what you want. Paradise.
In our culture that ultimate service centre is called "father and mother."
And from there the business only goes downhill.
In other words — you start meeting frustrations. And more frustrations. And more.
And worst of all? There is no external solution to that wretched frustration. You will simply have to… restrain yourself and bear it.
So now the question is not whether we shall manage to escape frustration entirely. That's impossible.
The more practical question is one of filtering and prioritising — which frustrations should we be careful of, and which frustrations shall we have to bear?
And the child, who grows and becomes an adolescent, understands very quickly that he must escape physical frustrations — accidents, illnesses, knives — and come to terms with emotional ones.
In other words — better that the heart break than the body. Unfortunately, the second depends on the first, and not the other way round.
The adolescent grows, becomes an adult, and if he has a drop of sense in his skull — many don't — he moves to the next stage of his dealings with suffering.
He understands that a certain amount of suffering is vital and even desirable.
Let's emphasise that point a little — in order to be happy in our lives, we have to go and look for things that cause us, among other things, suffering. On our own initiative. Of our own free will.
Quite a paradox.
Because to grow means to go into new territory. And what is in new territory? Correct… monsters. Unfamiliar things. Situations you have never met in your life and have no idea what to do with.
For example, a broken heart.
Remember the first serious break-up in our lives?
What a shock it was.
I personally remember the shock and the volleys of pain I experienced, somewhere at the pathetic age of eighteen. Now, don't imagine a romance of years. It was a fledgling break-up after two months of going out.
And it hurt. My word, how it hurt. I was in shock. I didn't know a heart could actually break. I thought it was a metaphor and that was that.
But say what you like — actually, better not, I'll only get annoyed — it was an important learning experience. Very important.
I remember my astonishment that the world went on existing and going about its business, while I was here bleeding out my break-up with her.
I understood, willy-nilly, that there will always be a gap between the internal interpretation and objective reality.
I understood that I had better adapt myself to the world, rather than wait, like a spoiled child, for the world to deign to adapt itself to me.
Since then, thank God, I have had more serious and significant relationships, and when they ended, the pain that followed made the break-up at eighteen look like a pleasant stroll down the boulevard.
True, it was very painful, but it wasn't new. There was an element of sorrow and longing and regret in it, but not of astonishment or surprise.
Internalise this: our psyche does not know how to make a change without experiencing pain.
Moreover, every romantic deepening of a bond of love raises the probability of pain, since every time you add a new layer — a good and interesting one — to your world, you have one more thing you can lose.
And if there are precious things in my world that I can lose, that supplies me with a new arsenal of things to worry about.
Think about clients, think about assets, think about a partner… think about children.
This is the most significant trade-off of the human heart — you want to climb to the peaks and experience the whole range of wonderful emotions a person is capable of feeling? Then accept that every good thing in your life carries within it the potential for pain.
So here's something from me, to finish:
You had better come to terms with the fact that isolated moments of suffering will occupy a certain part of your life — because if you don't internalise that insight, you will reach a state where isolated moments of life occupy a certain part of your suffering.