The Art of Enduring Pain

  

It’s easy to work when  we feel like doing something but our success in life is determined by the days when we don’t feel like doing anything. We all possess unique talents but many of us lack the discipline to nurture and groom it. Everyday we have to make a choice between the pain of discipline or the pain of regret. What we choose defines our life. Accepting pain and delaying the instant pleasure is the most difficult task in life but if practiced it leads to success, long-term satisfaction and happiness. But we all want to avoid pain in our lives therefore, we often indulge in instant pleasures which eventually leads to pain, the very thing we wanted to avoid. To be successful in life, we must learn to endure the pain needed to change our life. For enduring pain, we need vision, perseverance and a change of interpretation of situation. 

Having a clear vision of what you want and how it will influence your life gives you the needed strength and motivation to act but without determination and perseverance it will soon fade away. Determination literally means "The action of not stopping" . It is a positive emotional feeling that involves persevering towards a difficult goal in spite of obstacles. Determination occurs prior to goal attainment and serves to motivate behavior that will help achieve one's goal. When one is determined further reflection and distraction is excluded from within and you follow one path with conviction. Determination sets limits internally but not yet externally. It does not regard what is outside of the limits that are established but only inside. But perseverance doesn't care about external limits. Perseverance isn't afraid to go sideways or backwards. It picks a path and tries it until it's obvious that path isn't going to work, at which point it will try another. It continues to try until you get through the situation. It is like searching for a missing or lost item. 

When we fail to achieve the desired result, we become disheartened and lose motivation to take another goal. Marcus Aurelius quotes, “Change your interpretation of the situation in the positive light and you will get stronger. Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.” Your reality is made by your opinions about yourself and others. Reality is often different than we usually perceive. Even when we don’t have any serious problems our mind has the tendency to create some. Many of our problems can be solved just by having a different perspective i.e. changing our interpretation of the situation. For instance, change of interpretation is required in understanding texts or art, solving mathematical problems, parking a car, learning a new skill, designing a creative product etc. When we want to reconcile with someone or make peace with ourselves, we need to see the situation in a positive light which requires changing our interpretation of events which were earlier a source of conflict, stress and anxiety.  By having discussions with people who have different opinions than us, helps in gaining new perspectives which we can use in analyzing our situation. People who suffer from depression and avoid conversations with others generally have more suicidal tendency. Coping with depression requires rejecting your old beliefs and forming a new value system to view the world. Our value system determines our perception of the events around us. If we could change some of our old beliefs and values we could change our reality and thus, we can learn the art of enduring pain to cope with failure and depression.

Artwork Credits : Kashish Panjvani