Here is the only thing I want to say about suffering, and I want to say it plainly: the misery isn't in what happens. It's in the refusal to accept that it was always going to happen.
I've been ill. My income has contracted. People I rely on have failed me, and things I built carefully have come apart. I'm not reporting exceptional circumstances. I'm describing a life — any life, pursued long enough. These things come by order, not by accident. They are, as I've come to think of it, the tax of living. Nobody gets to use the road for free.
I shall pay up all my taxes willingly.
The trouble is we keep believing, somewhere beneath the reasoning, that we might be the exception. That if we arrange things carefully enough, choose wisely enough, we'll get the long life and also the immunity. But a long life includes exactly these things — the illness, the loss, the seasons of fear — the way a long journey includes mud and rain. You didn't pray for the sunshine and buy your way out of the weather. You prayed for the journey.
What I've trained myself toward — and I use the word "trained" deliberately, because it doesn't come naturally, not to me, maybe not to anyone — is something beyond mere endurance. Not gritting my teeth at what I can't change. Actually agreeing. Meeting what arrives not with a wry face but with a kind of recognition: yes, this too is part of it. There's a difference between obeying necessity and being reconciled to it. The first is just losing. The second is something closer to freedom.
I know how this sounds. I know it's easier to write than to live. But I've noticed that on the days I manage it — when difficulty arrives and I receive it without drama, without the additional suffering of resisting the suffering — those days go better. Not because the circumstances improve. Because I've stopped fighting on two fronts at once.
If some god offered you the choice between a life of perfect comfort and a life of genuine effort — the café or the camp, the turtle-dove or the soldier — I think you already know what you'd choose, in your honest moments. We weren't made for safety. We were made for use. The people who have been tossed about and tested and still held their course are the ones worth knowing, worth being. The others are merely undamaged.
Life is really a battle. What we call hardship is just the battle announcing itself.
Go toward it.
Paying my taxes without complaint,