Life throws many curve balls but the difficult ones in particular, are ones where you feel pulled from both sides. Quitting is not an option.
These experiences can put a large burden on your heart, your mind and your soul. It flows onto many other parts of your life. With the wrong attitude or certain triggers, you're off, spiraling into chaos. The most complex examples of these struggles I've encountered is that of relationships. Relationships where you are so heavily invested in, whether it be family or a partner or the closest of friends. It's only natural for a relationship of any kind to come across such sticky circumstances. It takes a great deal of effort to keep a relationship healthily progressing. A great deal of struggling, a great deal of arguing, a great deal of suffering but ultimately a commitment to keep seeing it through.
I never understood this. There's plenty of people in the world, I can find someone else. I can choose family, I can find another partner, I can choose new friends. It's not that easy at all. Being grounded, pragmatic and resilient is not mere theory. It's through lived experiences of the most difficult times of your life. It's unavoidable. When you are stuck and you aren't sure where to go, this is the opportunity. Recognise this. You would hardly ever be stuck and struggling so bad and you find the answer. This is no conventional movie. It would take countless struggles and even then, many people can't break through the mould. I look at my short life so far and think what concise key words or concepts can create recognition for others struggling deeply in suffering.
During deep suffering, our mind flails around like someone who cannot swim flailing in the shallow beach shore. "Stay calm!" "Relax!" Mere words mostly. Just like you cannot tell someone drowning with no swimming experience theory during the fact, I believe the same goes for someone suffering in crisis with no precedence. One needs to travel that journey fundamentally alone. From my experience, I believe the three key concepts (going back to the above) is a steady, somewhat brutally direct corrosion of the ego combined with a genuine belief in the values of discipline but also with love.
At some point during intense suffering, if you feel a strong sense of responsibility, a strong sense of love and support as well as hardened discipline, you can keep going. Long term. So when one is drowning, we don't rush to the sometimes worst yet so deeply engrained habits. We don't flail around and try to grab anything that remotely seems to be a floating life ring. Are these moments of flailing ego or just a desperate sheer innate desire to survive?... If someone was to ask me if the ego is necessary if one could eliminate anything, I believe the ego is necessary. To achieve an 'ego-less' we need 'ego'; inverse, duality etc.
We all have our own unique journeys. We may run at times, we may fight, we may give in: such is part of one's journey. Sometimes running away and giving up is part of the healing and/or growing process. Without discipline, without someone other than yourself that you trust and love guiding you away from your socially constructed defence mechanisms, often the ego, "you are just a feather in the wind". As one becomes more disciplined, you sharpen your tools of self-awareness. How you feel when you are upset and not in control of your emotions. How your shoulders may be tense, even ever so slightly. How you may not be breathing properly. How your thoughts are fixated and even if someone was to touch you on your shoulder, you may not even realise. Discipline teaches this as it demands one to slow down. Only during these moments of slowness, without distractions, do you begin to sit down and become a student to life.
In the grand scheme of things, life is a lot about incrementally increasing your capacity. Slowly and quickly: an ambivalent mix which will never see perfection. Such is the path to inner peace. The road to suffering is a confusing one. Things are not what they seem. What you know is not really what you know. Theory would argue we should not be around people who we feel we have to prove something. Theory says many things but these are not your experiences. You must find the answer to your own journey. Those that understand this can support one another, show each other their paths and their strategies but nothing more. Teaching without teaching.
Weather the storm. Keep going. Keep going on your journey. Make mistakes. But keep going. This journey demands sustainable self-regulation, where you don't fall too far to the extremities. Like a stable heart beat. Anyone can teach anything, gold may look like dirt and dirt may look like gold. Ultimately, it's all on you. We are only human.
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