“What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him.”
— Victor Frankl
I watched my wee boy this morning attempting to climb up on the window seat. On tip toes, his little arms reaching and pushing. It took him about fifteen minutes to get there, and I can’t tell you how chuffed he was after failing so many times. With a huge grin on his face, he bashed the window and laughed at the sheep outside.
He got down and tried again, this time gaining his summit in less than ten seconds.
I could have just lifted him up, but he wouldn’t have the satisfaction of achieving something hard, he wouldn’t have worked out how to do it for himself – I would be forever doing it for him. It was this little episode in my family life that showed me the truth of our opening quote.
Victor Frankl knows about struggle.
His life’s work and worldwide impact as a psychotherapist and author of “Man’s Search for Meaning” really came together through surviving the Nazi concentration camps in WW2.
He saw many people die, but he also saw people become better – so much better than their lives to date would suggest they had within them.
Physically they were in bad shape. But in their souls? They rose to the occasion. The struggle to survive made them as a person. It served them to rise beyond, and even inspire others, for the rest of their lives.
The struggle we embrace makes us more.
Which is a weird thing to type, as I often talk about ending the struggle. Maybe it's just semantics, but I don’t think we have to struggle, with anything.
I talk about finding peace, and sometimes people call me on it. “I don’t want to lose my edge”, they say. And so I’ve learnt I have to be careful who I use the “P word” with.
In our either/or world, we are attracted and repelled by peace.
Some of us just want sanctuary.
We want an end to the struggle and the stress and the decisions, sometimes even an end to the responsibilities of our lives. We just want to take a holiday … and rightly so. Holidays are grand, but they have to be short term. You’d be bored silly sitting on a beach drinking cocktails for the rest of your life.
Other people think peace is a cop out.
It’s a useless, boring state of doing nothing, achieving nothing. It’s complacency and irresponsibility. So if peace is bad, struggle and stress is good. They push and they fight and they try and force their way to getting what they want from life. They become so tightly wound that they’re ready to blow … and they do, regularly.
The truth is, in order to have a great life, you have to have both. You want peace AND struggle in life.
But in choosing both, you live them quite differently.
Peace –
Through practice you realise that it’s a choice that you make. It’s not about your external world. It is all about finding sanctuary within you, regardless of what’s happening.
Peace, in other words, is not the absence of challenge, but choosing to stay connected and on a level despite challenge.
You get clear on how you make struggle bite harder. You realise the power of your mind: focusing on the negative, the past and future, all the things you can’t control … it’s never the reality of a challenge that kicks us, it’s the stories we tell ourselves about the challenge that makes us suffer.
And it’s right here, after you do what you can and forget what you can’t, after you change what you focus on and stop wishing away the challenge, that your relationship to struggle changes.
You are freed from it.
Truly –
What becomes of a struggle when you freely embrace it? Is it still a struggle? If you, by choice, bear your own cross, does it cause suffering?
No, no it’s not, and no, it doesn’t.
The challenge is the same, but it’s not being done to you any more.
In your full acceptance, it becomes different. Even though it might cost you physical, emotional, mental resources, it doesn’t take away from you in a soul sense.
It adds to you.
It expands you. It enhances you. It makes you more of the person you were born to be. Which is an exciting track to be on.
Peace becomes not about hiding, not about “when this is over” – it becomes about now, however your now is. Struggle loses its sting and its sense of grind. It’s no longer a fight, but a dance. It’s about stretching you – in a good sense. It is about more, and we love more.
So – as always, in the sense of having 200% of life, choose “Yes, and …”.
Embrace the power of peace now, AND have something on the horizon that you’re working towards.
And there IS no need to struggle. It’s all happening for you.
Go well.
Arjuna