While only mid-week, I am looking forward to it ending, as there is too much going on at the same time at both work and at home. Work is pretty crazy, but that is nothing new I guess. However, this week Smallsteps is having a small procedure at the hospital to test some things. She will have a tube into her stomach to monitor and suffice to say, she isn't looking forward to it.
It was not the worst when I had similar done (feeding tube), but I was eighteen.
I remember a couple days after she was born and she was still in the intensive care unit, I ran into a client of mine with his doctor wife. I explained what was going on and she said how for the kids who have a rough start, they often have easier times later.
Smallsteps is due some easier times.
Her life is definitely not bad if compared to some, but that comparison matters little to an eight year old, or an adult even. However, there is also a difference in whether the discomfort or pain is suffering or not, which I think comes down to the reasoning behind it. When there is a "good reason" for the pain, humans are able to endure a lot quite easily. But when there is a poor reason or no reason at all, it becomes suffering instead.
I think it is a mix of whether there is the perceived potential of growth from the circumstance, some level of control over the situation, or gain at the other end of the tunnel. But, when there is little seen gain of any kind, it just becomes a type of torture. Recently, Smallsteps has been asking more often,
"Why me?"
And there is no good reason. It is just the luck of the draw in life. Some people have relatively pain-free lives, others are under pressure constantly. While humans have some sense of "fairness", nature doesn't have any care for it at all. Things happen, things don't happen. That is about it.
We can affect some of our conditions though, which gives us agency. Having agency is part of that model above I mentioned where we can add some meaning to circumstances and our resulting actions. Even in failure, we can say we tried, even if we suffer the same fate as if we had done nothing at all. This speaks to it being the "journey" rather than the destination, as if it was just about the result, it wouldn't matter how we got there.
But it does.
A person has five million dollars in the bank.
Does the "how and why" they have the money, matter? I think that most people would say it did, even though for all intents and purpose, the person has the same five million to spend as they wish. And while it might be easy to judge from the outside looking in, it is likely that the relationship that the person has with that money is going to be different than had it been collected through a different way.
We tend to value what we have sweated for higher than what has come easily, and I wonder if this applies to how we feel about the people we interact with. After all, investing into people and our interactions with them is how we build social capital, so if we have to invest more, do we end up valuing them more? Does it apply to our children? I don't know. But I assume so, because it seems to apply to everything else we invest our effort into.
Meaning might be hard to find for many of us, but maybe it is because we are looking for meaning first, rather than investing into something enough that it becomes meaningful. For instance, I think a lot of people don't like their work and would rather do something else, but if that work was what allowed a parent to provide for a sick kid, I think that it still wouldn't be fun to do, but it would move from "suffering the work" to having meaning for the work. There is a journey, involved, a path toward the desired outcome.
A meaning to an end.
It is not just a way, it is an experience. And like it or not, we value the hard experiences in our lives more than the easy, because we had to work to overcome them. It is much like the weight of a loss being twice that of a gain, because there is more impact in the negative aspects of life. But, if there is just negative experience with no light at the end of the tunnel, no reason, no growth, we feel hopeless and what we do, becomes meaningless.
Is what we do, worth it?
It probably isn't about what we are doing, but rather, why we are doing.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
