Failure and Suffering
"If you want to be successful, I would encourage you to grow a tolerance for failure." — Jensen Huang, CEO, Nvidia
Dear Friends,
I have been thinking more about failure and suffering these days. The people, it seems, who have the greatest drive have also experienced the most hardship.
Jensen Huang, Nvidia CEO, recently said:
“Greatness is not formed out of smart people, it is formed out of people who have suffered.”
I have seen this again and again … the more fragile we are, the more we try to avoid suffering, the less resilient we are.
At the same time, if we are drowned by suffering, it serves no one. People who live in poverty and violence have very hard lives. And if someone is in pain, we naturally want to take away that pain.
This is often the great challenge of parents:
We do not want our children to suffer AND we know that some level of suffering is how they learn wisdom, resilience, and compassion. Or as they say in Zen, “No mud, no lotus.”
Of course, there is a time to comfort and kiss the scraped knee, to love and cherish, and there is a time to let children work it out. At times, our help does not help. The same is true of ourselves and the society.
As we look at the challenges in both the US and the globe, there is likely suffering ahead. Things will get difficult, be it from climate change or political shifts.
And maybe the real questions are:
“Will suffering expand us or close us?”
“Will it bring us together or further distance us?”
Nelson Mandela
Mandela is a great example and teacher in this. In a 1970 letter to his then-wife, Winnie Mandela, during her imprisonment in Kroonstad, Nelson Mandela reflected on the introspective opportunities that confinement can offer:
“You may find that the cell is an ideal place to learn to know yourself, to search realistically and regularly the processes of your own mind and feelings.”
He further advised:
"Regular meditation, say of about 15 minutes a day before you turn in, can be fruitful in this regard."
The Invitation
The greatest leaders, be they business, social, or spiritual teachers, suffered. And that suffering deepened them.
Hopefully we can all do the same, both individually and collectively. We can both work to limit suffering in all the ways we can, and also learn from it.
The future of our world may depend on it.
See offerings below in this spirit.
Blessings,
SOREN
Meditation Series
Join us for Stillness Within: Cultivating Presence in Uncertain Times. With an amazing group of guest teachers including Roshi Joan Halifax, Trudy Goodman, Jon Kabat-Zinn, and Sharon Salzberg.
Social Change Series
Dick Schwartz, IFS founder, and I will be leading a series in Personal Change, Collective Impact. We will explore how work on ourselves supports our work in the world. Join us!
When will humanity awaken to an alternative that is already baked into our being, waiting to be discovered?
“The fundamental tenet of the great Faiths insists that suffering is an inescapable truth, inherent to life as we know it. For millennia, a principal purpose of virtually all spiritual faiths and practices has been to offer various prescriptions for accommodating, mitigating, utilizing, or otherwise sublimating said suffering in our lives – allegedly in the service of making us stronger, whole people. Why must suffering be a fundamental element of our experience? Universal Law? Really?? Why should we accept the axiom that the path to wisdom must route through a broken heart? Could all these gyrations around suffering reveal themselves to be just rationalizations once a superior alternative way of BEING becomes apparent?
Most who suffer, fail to reach the rewarding wisdom that the “elite” sufferers achieve. For how much longer will we continue to delude ourselves that our scars are badges? Isn’t it past time we traded up to a more wholesome integrated construct?”
https://bohobeau.net/2023/07/29/transition/
Comeback I want more-of you-but I am learning pauses now.