Let’s get sad
If there is one thing in life that is certain, it’s that you will suffer. Emotional and physical pain are part of our lovey existence on this chunk of rock hurtling through space. No matter how hard you ignore it and try to “be happy”, the pain will always be with you. We’ve all lost friends, loved ones, suffered through sickness or trauma and the worst part is that we know one day it’s all going to end, and our blip of a life will be lost to history. You can have an otherwise perfect week, no work drama, good training sessions, time with people you love and still be crushed out of the blue with self loathing and depression. Today, I want to talk about suffering, and how important it is to your life no matter how much you despise it.
Anguish
Firstly, pain and anguish provide us with a counterbalance to happiness and pleasure, every yin has its yang. If you lived your whole life without loss or struggle, you wouldn’t have any way to know when times are great. Everything would be one level flat existence, not bad, not good, no highs, and no lows. A life without suffering is most certainly an inhuman life. The bad times make us appreciate the good, and going through a hardship can make you more appreciative of the things that you’ve still got. A loss of a loved one or friend can bring the rest of your group closer and make remaining relationships more meaningful. Now, I don’t mean to make it sound like you should write off your suffering as something that will always lead to a greater good, sometimes things are demonstrably unjust, and bad things will happen to good people for no other reason than they are alive. You cannot avoid it, and if you try to you’ll only make it worse when it hits you how cruel and meaningless our universe is. The suffering can make you so angry you can’t breath, or so depressed you cannot get out of bed, but what’s important is that you carry on. Because our struggles are what make us human, our pain is what highlights our joy, our perseverance is what proves our character.
Weightlifting
Okay, so what does weightlifting have to do with any of this? In my mind it has everything to do with it. By choosing to get physically stronger, you are choosing to go through a certain degree of pain and suffering in training, in order to get the strength you desire. We weightlifters self impose literal burdens, and push our bodies and minds to do the things we never thought possible, but that’s not to say every day is pleasant. When training you will have days you don’t want to lift, but you will anyways; days when you are so sore you can hardly move, but you will anyways; days when it feels like the bar is mocking you, but you keep going. The self imposed suffering of the training is all worth it for that one perfect workout, that PR attempt in a competition, just a good day of training with your teammates. If it was easy, it wouldn’t be worth a thing, the challenge and occasional misery is what makes it worthwhile in the end.
In short
Don’t lie to yourself and try to be happy all the time, sometimes being alive is miserable. Be genuine and accept the pain as it comes, don’t blow it off, or try to look on the bright side, take the time to feel that crushing sadness. Feel hopeless, feel tired, feel sore, feel like you totally forgot how to snatch. Because we are lucky to be feeling anything at all. Our time is so short and every horrible experience is still one you were able to have because you’re alive. The suffering will bring all the more meaning to the next time your lover holds your hand, you see an old friend, or you finally snatch over 100kg. Don’t ignore your pain, acknowledge it, feel it, but be resilient and endure. I’ll leave you with a quote.
“To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities — I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not — that one endures.”
Friedrich Nietzsche