Build Your Life’s Meaning: Pain and Pleasure
You need to consider your future and ask yourself, “What would my inner life look like if I willingly took on difficult work and impossible projects with every resource I have without excuses? What if I entered the difficulties and expected to emerge better and stronger?”
“We can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world….No doubt pain as God’s megaphone is a terrible instrument; it may lead to final and unrepented rebellion. But it gives the only opportunity the bad man can have for amendment. it removes the veil; it plants the flag of truth within the fortress of the rebel soul.”
C.S. Lewis (The Problem of Pain)
It’s the pain that proves you’re alive. Not the pleasure.
Good masters are like good parents. They know pleasure is the great squanderer of lives. The teenager calls their parents mean because they do not want them to be happy vis-a-vis pleasure-seeking. A creature of comfort always lies — in death, deception, or both. Pleasure-seeking is only good when it is routed through the lens of pain.
Pain is your unanswerable tutor. A creative lesson shouting down your mediocrity. A megaphone you always hear.
Pain shouts down your mediocrity.
If the easy thing were the right thing, you would have already done it. When faced with either difficulty or ease, without any other direction, the only safe option is to choose to do the difficult. This is why the 9 Steps are along the narrow path, and not the wide path of common men.
"If the easy thing were the right thing, you would have already done it."
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Your right and good posture for approaching God’s purpose in your life is to seek his pleasure alone. It’s the joy of a proud father in you as an obedient son or daughter. By obeying — aiming higher for a master to follow and finding an enemy to defeat — true joy in you becomes possible. And far more likely.
Not that God, or the cosmos, will give you pleasure, but will instead help you look through pain to see meaningful joy is possible. And that is real hope you can hold onto.
"Your joy comes from the source of your wounds — those wounds right and rewrite you."
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Before I had a family, I could never see beyond myself. I fancied myself a future Manhattanite or Vegasite, but never a suburbanite. But as I thought about it, I realized I must see past the childish desires of sports cars, free weekends, video games, and trips with the boys — onto the higher and truer desires. Those more holy desires, the ones throughout the millennia which every great man eventually turned and hardly anyone regretted: truth, love, beauty, and brave sacrifice.
To be needed by someone who needs you and loved by someone who loves you is real life. It’s really the only life. After all, only those who will attend my funeral count.
"To be needed by someone who needs you and loved by someone who loves you is real life.
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It’s the only real life."
Life is only dignified in your service to others who need you. And if no one needs you, you have yet to discover real life. You receive it as you take up anticipated friction and hurt for the possibility of love. Life is the taking up of anticipated pain for love. This exchange offers you a woodstove-warmed rustic cabin on the side of a remote mountain. Only a fool trades that for a cold concrete box in a city to live and die alone.
"Life is the taking up of anticipated pain for the hope of love."
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“We are not cabin-dwellers, born to a life cramped and confined; we are meant to explore, to seek, to push the limits of our potential as human beings. The world of the senses is just a base camp: we are meant to be as much at home in consciousness as in the world of physical reality.”
Ved Vyasa, The Bhagavad Gita
And to take on temporary pain willingly saves you the eternal pains thrust upon you. For instance, when I chose to begin rising at 3:30 AM to get to the office to begin my enlightenment, that was painful. I struggled to get to sleep the night before. But eventually, I was tired enough to go straight to sleep. My willingly accepted struggle overtook the easy thing that had been missing evenings with my family to work late.
You’ll sleep if you work and live hard enough.
"You will receive temporary pains willingly,
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or eternal pains forcibly."
The only way to be satisfied with yourself is through difficult work and voluntary discomfort. You will never respect yourself without it. Respect from others never arrives otherwise.
My loss of sleep to rise earlier than I wanted was tough. The loss of my low-aimed singlehood dreams, Congress, power, Manhattan was painful if I do not look to the other side of the scale. If the voluntary struggle is best, then the love on the other side of the scale will more than balance. And it does. My wife and kids tip over all those fleeting vague promises. And that choosing to do the hard thing begins to make a good life.
Who would you become if you believed my drop of hope could invade your life at the right time?
And that right time would always be after you’d want it and after you’d exhausted all your other options.
If you will leave your house and get out of your car, you may find yourself exposed enough to allow a random encounter to disrupt your misery. Or enhance your joy. Your responsibility is to deimprision yourself. Pain, not pleasure, is the key now calling out to you.
Rick
