A Little Soapbox of My Own

It’s funny, I think, how life is always just barely easy enough to live, just barely not too hard. I’m astounded, sometimes, at just how much a person is really capable of enduring, of overcoming. There’s just so much potential tucked into the clever corners of the human mind that it’s no wonder some people have been able to achieve and devise such amazing and awe-inspiring things as riddle human history.
We shy away from hardship, and flinch when it comes near, but after the storm passes and the trial is over, the weaker elements have been scorched from out the crucible and those more ingenious faces of the soul are forced from their hidden places. It is our suffering that makes us stronger, as the benefit of exercise comes from the rebuilding of muscle tissues torn down and destroyed by exertion, and the benefit of education comes from the painful tedium of study and unabashed contemplation.
It’s not that horrible things happen to people because they deserve them, but so that they have an opportunity to prove their strength to themselves in forcing life to go on. We’ve all had moments of perfect darkness when it seemed to us as though our lives were over and that there was nothing left of the world we wanted to live in, but before long it dawned on us that that world had never truly existed, and before it ever could we had to do something to bring it about. The darkest depths of hopelessness can be liberating, the sensation of complete impotence very empowering. Enlightening, at the very least, to see the world looking up from the bottom and understand just how little control anyone has over their lives and what happens in them, enslaved always by the version of reality they were born into and taught to perceive and to follow along with…
Ethnocentrism. We have a word for it, and we know what it means, but that doesn’t keep us from believing that our way is still the best way, doesn’t keep us from falling into the same misconception that has afflicted every great civilization to come along before us. But every great civilization sees its zenith, and is quickly humbled by the instructive rod of history in the making.
Hardship comes inevitably and to everyone, a mask of disaster and fear pulled over the winking face of opportunity and change, revolution and growth. I see the coming troubles as the fever that will burn the disease from our society, not as a herald of the apocalypse or the early rumblings of the next World War—I have higher hopes for us. There’s a lot going wrong in the world right now, and there always has been, and though it seems as though there’s more problems than there’s ever been before I feel as though we’re the closest we’ve ever been to really solving things for everybody. The answers, as always, are just locked away in our heads somewhere. We only need to get at them.
“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." -- Albert Einstein