“If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home… Fulfillment… is a function of time. The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal… It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell… The thing about working with time, instead of against it, …is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts.”
– Ursula Le Guin
Reflection:
I see so many people (myself included!) avoid and run away from opportunities for joy due to fear of suffering, pain, and failure. Who and what are you turning away from in your life? What are you losing by saying no to those opportunities?
Life is not as certain as you think. So many of us operate on 2, 5, 10 year plans, when tomorrow it could all radically change. I think we need to ask ourselves more often–is it worth the risk to be patient, to feel secure, to feel ‘ready’ before we take a leap? There will always be another excuse, more growth we need to do, but there is only one today. And people, opportunities, can disappear as fast as they appear.