Tough few weeks in the White house. Not that we have anything to complain about…but Victor Frankl reminds me that “the size of human suffering is absolutely relative”, so it is what it is.
One positive aspect of suffering is captured well by Ken Wilber:
“Suffering is the first grace. In a special sense, suffering is almost a time of rejoicing, for it marks the birth of creative insight.”
(Source: Phillip Z. A Skeptics Guide)
I am finding this to be true in ways that I had not imagined, and could not have seen on my own. Ironically, I tell clients about this all the time: “We don’t know what we don’t know, we need others to provide us with objective perspective.”
A new friend has done this for me very aptly, and with my own words! She forwarded a copy of an article that I had written for SaskBusiness Magazine last year. As I read the article I was impacted by the truth, and inspired…before I realized that it was my own writing! I needed the reminder, the nudge to embrace the truth I already knew.
So how did objective perspective help me? It helped me discover a creative insight:
That one of the pearls of suffering is that we deepen our belief in the truth that we already know.
