My past 30 years of life has taught me one lesson if no other, and that is that life is difficult. This a my greatest truth, one of the greatest truths ever realized to man. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult, once we truly understand and accept it, then life is no longer difficult. Once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.
Most do not fully see this truth that life is difficult. Instead they moan more or less incessantly, noisily or subtly about the enormity of their problems, their burdens, and their difficulties as if life were generally easy, as if life should be easy. They voice their belief, noisily or subtly, that their difficulties represent a unique kind of affliction that should not be and that has somehow been especially visited upon them, or else upon their families, their tribe, their class, their nation, their race or even their species, and not upon others. I know about this moaning because I have done my share.
I have learned throughout my tumultuous life that we live a series of problems while on this journey. Are we to moan about them or solve them? Do we want to teach our children and future generations to moan about their problems or to overcome them?
How do you overcome your problems? Do you exercise, go to therapy, practice yoga? What do you do? Everyone wants to know the secret to successfully being happy and overcoming every obstacle with grace and ease.
I believe Discipline is the basic set of tools we require to solve life's problems. Without discipline we can solve nothing. With only some disciple, we can solve only some problems. With total disciple we can solve all problems. Problems are the cutting edge that distinguishes between success and failure. Problems call forth our courage and our wisdom; indeed, they create our courage and our wisdom. It is only because of problems that we grow mentally and spiritually. When we desire to encourage the growth of the human spirit we challenge and encourage the human capacity to solve problems, just as in school we deliberately set problems for our children to solve. It is through the pain of confronting and resolving problems that we learn.
As Benjamin Franklin once said, "Those things that hurt, instruct." It is for this reason that wise people learn not to dread but actually to welcome problems and actually to welcome the pain of problems. Many are not as wise and they have mastered avoiding the pain, they fear the pain. All most all of us to a less or greater degree, attempt to avoid the pain sometimes. We procrastinate, hoping that the problem will go away. We ignore them, forget them, pretend they do not exist. We attempt to skirt around problems rather than meet them head on. We attend to get out of them rather than suffer through them.
This tendency to avoid problems and the emotional inherent in them is the primary basis of all human mental illness. "Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering" says Carl Jung. But the substitute itself ultimately becomes more painful than the legitimate suffering it was designed to avoid.
As mentioned previously, I believe discipline is the basic set of tools needed to solve life's problems. It will become clear that these tools are techniques of suffering, means by which we experience the pain of problems in such a way as to work them through and solve them successfully.
Work through your problems, push through your pain.
