Pre-reading Questions:
Do you believe that life is difficult?
What are some of the difficulties that you have encountered in your life?
What suggestions did you get from your parents or friends when you met with difficulties in your life?
Life is difficult.
This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths.It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult-once we truly understand and accept it - then life isno longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, that fact that life is difficult no longer matters.
Most people do not fully see this truth that life is difficult.
Instead they moan more or less incessantly, noisily or subtly, about the enormity of their problems, their burdens, and their difficulties as if life were generally easy, as if life should be easy. They voice their belief noisily or subtly, that their difficulties represent a unique kind of affliction that should not be and that has somehow been especially visited upon them, or else upon their families, their tribe, their class, their nation,their race, or even their species, and not upon others.l know about this moaning because l have done my share.
Life is a series of problems. Do we want to moan about them or solve them? Do we want to teach our children to solve them?
Discipline is the basic set of tools we require to solve life's problems.Without discipline we can solve nothing. With only some discipline we can solve only some problems. With total discipline we can solve all problems.
What makes life difficult is that the process of confronting and solving problems is a painful one.Problems, depending upon their nature, evoke in us frustration of grief, sadness, loneliness, guilt, regret,anger, fear, anxiety, anguish,or despair. These are uncomfortable feelings, often very uncomfortable, often as painful as any kind of physical pain, sometimes equaling the very worst kind of physical pain. indeed, it is because of the pain that events or conflicts engender in us all that we can call them problems. And since life poses and endless of problems, life is always difficult and is full of pain as well as joy.
Yet it is in this whole process of meeting and solving problems that life has its meaning Problems are the cutting edge that distinguishes between success and failure. Problems call forth our courage and our wisdom;indeed, they create our courage and our wisdom. It is only because of problems that we grow mentally and spiritually. When we desire to encourage the growth of the human spirit, we challenge and encourage the human capacity to resolve problems,just as in school we deliberately set problems for our children to solve. it is through the pain of confronting and resolving that we learn.As Benjamin Franklin said, “Those things that hurt, instruct." It is for this reason that wise people learn no to dread but actually to welcome problems and actually to welcome the pain of problems.
