Misery Loves Misery

Dwayne: I wish I could just sleep until I was eighteen and skip all this crap. High school and everything. Just skip it. 
Frank: Do you know who Marcel Proust is? 
Dwayne: He's the guy you teach.
Frank: Yeah. French writer. Total loser. Never had a real job. Unrequited love affairs. Gay. Spent 20 years writing a book almost no one reads. But he's also probably the greatest writer since Shakespeare. Anyway, he gets down to the end of his life, and he looks back and decides that all those years he suffered, those were the best years of his life, 'cause they made him who he was. All those years he was happy? Total waste. Didn't learn a thing. So, if you sleep until you're 18, think of the suffering you're gonna miss. I mean high school? Those are your prime suffering years. You don't get better suffering than that...

The above quote is from the movie 'Little Miss Sunshine'. If anyone has watched the film, and you really should, you'll probably remember Steve Carrell imparting this wisdom to his nephew. Despite being entirely funny, it is also very true, and probably one of my favourite movie quotes of all time.

The topic is contentment. Happiness in your current state of being. I read the word and imagine someone sitting in a warm, comfy armchair with a blanket, some snacks, watching tv or reading a newspaper. Maybe there's a cat purring away on their lap. It's all very nice. Pleasant. You're happy and don't really care what happens outside or if this moment ever ends.

It is also completely useless.

Contentment is the opposite of living. If you are content, you are more or less metaphorically dead. My philosophy has, and always will be, that experience is life. When you are content, you are experiencing nothing new. You are living in a stale, albeit comfortable, state where there is nothing left to strive for. So by that rationale, pain and suffering is life, as those are the only real times you experience anything meaningful at all. The times you are happy, content, comfortable, you are not learning anything. It's the years of hardship and pain that define us. What do winning sports teams learn? And what about a team that has lost? At the top, the only ways are stagnation or decline and the old saying, learn from your mistakes rings ever true.

People frustrate the heck out of me when they do not want to venture out of their comfort zone. They never want to feel discomfort. They're so zealous to actively avoid displeasure and pain that it rules their entire life. And when suffering comes, and it does, it hits them hard and they scarcely cope. But they learn. What were they learning by avoiding risk and by avoiding pain? They learnt only how to avoid living.

It may sound a bit like I'm stuck in Clive Barker's 'Hellraiser' novel, but I really do believe everything I've written above is true. I don't live for status or fame or wealth. I live for experience, because that is my version of success. The days I'm most miserable are the days where I do nothing. I don't experience anything. The days where I'm at home, stagnating; content and comfortable, but completely miserable at the fact. And from the misery, I learn. Mostly not to sit around being miserable haha...

So every day I strive to add a new experience to my life. At the end, I want to be able to look back with many stories to tell and say "I have no regrets". I may have experienced a lot of suffering, and I really have already in my short life, but to tell the truth, I kinda enjoy the pain. I look back on tough times in my life and think "I made it! I'm here!" There will undoubtedly be times I enjoy an experience, and other times I do not enjoy an experience, but the key thing is to accept every experience, appreciate what it can teach you and don't see failure, discomfort and pain as a bad thing, but as a chance to learn and live. Through being unhappy it comes around and in turn, makes me happy.

This feeds pretty well into a mind-blowing radio show I listened to late one night a few months ago. I kidnapped my family's head-set radio and flicked through the channels. I came to one, the last FM frequency, the local suburb's station, probably with an audience you could count on a single hand. And yet it was one of the most profound shows I've ever listened to, on Buddhism and suffering. If I look through the notes I took down, I'll find the name of the speaker and give it to you sometime.

The speaker talked a lot about suffering and pain. The true way to life is to take the 'middle path', experiencing the high and lows of the life around you. The joy and the suffering. The monks he talked of saw these experiences as positive experiences and that this middle path is the road to liberation. Buddha says himself, "Life is dukkha". No, it's not slang, it means suffering. Life is suffering. For Buddhists, the view of suffering is so vastly different from the association we make with the term in Western culture: unpleasantness, to be avoided, bad. But whether we notice it or not, from the moment we are born, to the moment we die, we are suffering. There is no avoiding it. Whether you learn from it is another thing entirely.

Although it's always nice to be comfortable and content, I think I'd much rather prefer to suffer and be happy in that suffering for the rest of my days. Always happy, but never content. I don't want to know that day I stand there thinking I've got nothing more to achieve, nothing more to learn, nothing more to gain and experience. The day we stop striving, suffering and seeking new experience is the day we are dead.

Greetings Russian Readers!

I'm a huge stats fan, so imagine my surprise when I looked at this blog's statistics and found that it was getting really popular in Russia. This is probably not of importance to anyone (not even the Russian readers), but more for my own bemusement. Stay tuned for more, or as they say in Russia...

Actually scratch that. I put the sentence in the translator, and it instead spewed out a bunch of Star Trek symbols my computer cannot copy. And I call myself a quarter-Russian... pah.