Author | Zhou Guo Ping
Reading | High
Editor | Cui Hai Shuyuan (ID: cuihai shuyuan)
Click above green label to listen to high-pitched readingLife is inevitable to suffer hardshipSo-called hardship refers to events and circumstances that cause great pain. It includes personal inability to resist natural disasters and man-made disasters, such as encountering turmoil or famine, suffering life-threatening serious illnesses, or the death of loved ones. It also includes personal major setbacks in social life, such as heartbreak, marital breakdown, and business failure. Some people even if they have good luck in these two aspects, they cannot avoid the hardship that everyone will eventually face – death.Therefore, how to face hardship is a major life lesson facing everyone. People often regard hardship as purely negative things in life, and should be completely denied. Of course, hardship is different from proactive adventure, adventure has a sense of excitement of challenging, while we endure hardship is always inevitable. However, as a person's negative hardship, it alsois it completely negative?Hardship and happiness are opposite things, but they have one thing in common, that is, they are directly related to the soul, and they are both involved in the evaluation of life's meaning.In most cases, our souls are dormant. Once we feel happiness or suffer hardship, it awakens. If happiness is the great joy of the soul, this joy comes from a strong feeling of the beautiful meaning of life, then hardship is because it shakes the foundation of life, hit people's confidence in the meaning of life, thus causing the soul to fall into great pain. Life's meaning is only an object of the soul, whether it is affirmed or questioned, as long as it is genuine, it must be the soul's appearance. External events may be tragic, if it does not shake the soul, nor become a spiritual event, it will not be considered hardship. A thing that can awaken the soul, make it in a tense and vibrant state of great pain, should be said to have a certain spiritual value. Most of the time, we live in the external world. We are busy with daily life, busy with work, socializing and entertainment, rarely taking time to think about ourselves, and rarely taking time to think about life. However, when we suffer misfortune, our accustomed bodies stop.Misfortune interrupts our habitual life, and also provides an opportunity, forcing us to break away from external things. As long as we are willing to use this opportunity, willing to think, we will gain a new perspective on life. The ancient Roman philosophers believed that adversity inspires wisdom, and Buddhism regards the recognition of hardship as the starting point of enlightenment. Life has its tragic side, if we ignore it, it is superficial. Of course, we must not be discouraged by this. I believe that a person who still loves life despite enduring hardship will certainly have many treasures extracted from pain.Hardship not only improves our awareness, but also improves our personality. Hardship is the test of personality, the attitude towards hardship is the most able to show whether a person possesses inner dignity. For example, if a person is heartbroken, as long as the heartbroken person truly loves the person who left him, he cannot help but feel great pain. However, for the same heartbreak, some people are self-destructive and depressed, some people are hostile and retaliatory, and some people endure it with dignity and respect for others' feelings, it is a huge difference in personality.
Of course, people's personality is not unchanged, their attitude towards pain is also shaping their personality. No matter what hardship they face, as long as they always remain vigilant and possess the freedom to take what attitude, and encourage themselves to bear hardship with a noble and dignified attitude, they will be more effective in improving their personality.Hardship always has an irreversible nature. However, in most cases, this refers to the irreversible loss of a certain important value, at the same time, life still has other values, they inspire the sufferers to bear the present hardship. For example, a heartbroken person may have completely lost faith in love, but he will still live for his career or for his loved ones. There is a kind of hardship that not only has no prospects and is irreversible, but also means the destruction of all other values, and it cannot be compensated by other means. In this hopeless situation, if we still try to endure hardship, this significance is almost solely in the way we endure hardship.During the Second World War, there was a man named Frankl who was imprisoned in Auschwitz concentration camp. Almost everyone who entered this camp died, and they waited for the gas chamber and cremation. Frankl's parents, wife, and brother-in-law had all met this fate. However, Frankl miraculously survived, and he wrote a very moving book describing his experience and thinking in the camp. Under the almost hopeless situation, he was not destroyed by the inhuman cruelty of the camp because he found meaning in enduring hardship. He said: to endure hardship with dignity, this is a real inner achievement, because it proves that people can always maintain spiritual freedom no matter what. In fact, we all will eventually face a hardship without prospects – death, and to endure death with dignity is undoubtedly our greatest achievement in spiritual life.
