Paddling Upstream, Against the Current

Humans are strange creatures.

I often find myself wondering why so many of us-- and I'm not entirely excluding myself, here-- seem to deliberately (and often repeatedly) choose "the hard way" to do things.

Well. OK.

Maybe I am excluding myself-- to some degree-- because a substantial part of my "life's work" has revolved the quest to always find the "lowest point" of the proverbial fence to jump over. In fact, if I can, I will probably walk around the fence (or crawl under it), so I don't have to jump, at all.

As someone once observed about me "You'll put an almost insane amount of effort into figuring out how to not put any effort into something."

So when I feel baffled by people's choices, I expect that part of it is a failure-- on my behalf-- to have much appreciation for the "because I CAN" paradigm for living. Of course, part of it is personal opinion... I believe the world would be a better people if people were more willing to "think" through things, rather than "muscle" through them.

"Yeah, I climbed over the fence at the tallest part, where all the razor wire is! Look at what a badass I am!"

Yeah. No. Who gives a shit? What's more, while you're busy gloating over your superior fence climbing skills, did it even cross your mind that one side-effect of your suffering antics is that several people are now tasked/saddled with tending to the bleeding cuts on your arms?

Sometimes I feel like a better name for this blog might be "Miserably Misanthropic Mumblings."

But I digress.

So what am I really talking about, here?

Since I spend a lot of time in the self-development, consciousness and "enlightenment" business, I am always confuddled by the number of people who actively choose some form of "suffering," operating under the twisted perspective that wisdom (or even just "contentment") in life "isn't a thing" unless you've endured twenty years of hardship and misery to attain it.

It is almost like there is "status" and "ego value" attached to protracted suffering.

Here's a metaphor for you (because I love those!):

We stand before a thorny thicket, filled with a tangle of stinging nettles and blackberry vines. It seems we have to traverse 200 feet of it.

Looking at the thicket and going "Wow, that's a nasty mess, and going through there will cut me to threads. I'm just going to walk a mile down here to the side and go AROUND that, instead" is often not seen as "real" wisdom. It's "cheating," on some level.

"Wisdom," in many cases seems to only apply to the process of painstakingly forging a path through the thicket, getting yourself torn up, scratched and burned as you go, then emerging on the other side as "a survivor." Twenty years of suffering, thank-you, come-again.

Wow. Painful. Let's just walk around, 'm-kay?

"But it's not that simple!"

Well,

Therein lies the rub, alas. Somehow we take the opinion of the goo-roo who spent 30 years eating bread and water in order to reach enlightenment as "more meaningful" than the person who woke up one morning and said "Thus sucks, so I'm going to do it differently and be happy." And then is.

It is as if we attach a twisted "nobility" to eternal suffering and considerable skepticism to simplicity and common sense.

Aside from the prosaic truism "Misery loves company," why do we so often choose suffering? Why would we rather try to paddle our little canoes of life UPstream against the current?