It seems to me that while the idea of struggling appears to be simpler and easier to understand than the idea of sacrificing, people seem more comfortable with sacrifice than they are with struggle. The idea that one gives up something in order to (hopefully) gain something of greater value is considered in the society I live in to be among the greatest things a person can do. Those who make sacrifices are considered the greatest among people. As common examples, figures such as Mother Teresa and Mahatma Gandhi are considered exemplars of sacrifice, giving up their own luxuries and comforts in order to serve others. But is it sacrifice that they have done, or is it struggle (or perhaps a combination of the two)?
When I use the term “struggle,” I have in mind something similar to what in the Buddhist tradition is often referred to as “suffering.” Where suffering might be understood as a state of being, where one is not entirely settled (always wanting; always unsatisfied), struggle is the act one would take in order to at least try to escape suffering. Reading over what I’ve just written, I think I’ve made my point more confused rather than clearer, so I will try again.
When I graduated high school, my parents gave me a Toyota Corolla. It wasn’t a new car; it was my mom’s old car. They suggested I had earned it by doing well in school. However, I didn’t view the situation as they did. I didn’t understand. For me, high school wasn’t much work at all. Most of my classes came easy to me and I rarely (if ever) needed to study. I did not view high school to be something I had to work very hard at, and so graduating high school did not come with any significant sense of achievement. In fact, for me, I was simply happy to get out so that I could move on with my life. The gift of a car, under these circumstances, was not something I had earned. It was simply something I gained without any real effort. And I unfortunately treated this car with the same amount of respect as I felt toward my high school career. In other words, I ran the car into the ground, not taking care of it and damaging it greatly over the few years I drove it.
Later in my life, when I again was in need of a vehicle, I found an opportunity to purchase an Nissan Xterra at a significantly discounted price. I had been working in “the real world” for a while by then, and had learned to save money reasonably well. I had the cash in my savings account to cover the entire cost of the vehicle. This time around, I knew precisely where the money came from, as I had to earn it through my labours. Using my own father’s suggested calculations, the price of the Xterra (for me) was approximately four months’ wages. That is, were I to have set aside every single penny I had earned over the course of four months of my working, not using that money for anything else (such as rent or food), then I would have earned just enough to purchase this vehicle. Keep in mind that means working approximately eight hours a day, five days a week, for about sixteen weeks. That’s a significant expenditure of my efforts for this vehicle.
In the case of this Xterra, I understood the efforts I had to make in order to earn this vehicle. This vehicle was worth approximately four months of my life. Knowing and understanding this, I treated the vehicle with much more respect. While still not perfect, I at least tried to maintain the vehicle, performing the routine repairs and upkeep on the vehicle. I say I tried, because I discovered years later where I had been deficient when I was forced to deal with a broken timing belt. If you are not aware of such things, you’d have been in the same situation as I was at the time this happened. Most people told me that such an incident was unrecoverable, and that I ought to simply purchase a new vehicle. I was very lucky I had a friend who helped me to replace the belt, and I am happy to say I still drive the Xterra to this day.
The situation I found myself in with the Corolla was not struggle, but the situation with the Xterra was struggle. Struggle, for me, is the situation where one has to put in effort or work in order to gain something. One cannot be given struggle; one must earn it themselves through their own efforts. When I work toward something, then I am struggling. Struggle, for me, is not a negative (nor positive) thing. Struggle is simply a way to describe how something came about. If I gain something through my efforts, such as working a job, then I have struggled for it, in this case money. If I gain something because someone simply gives it to me, such as the Corolla that my parents gave me for graduating high school, then I have not struggled for it. Thus, struggle is a measure of the effort I make toward my projects.
As the example above may also demonstrate, struggling toward my projects also brings with it a respect for those projects. The more I struggle for something, the more I respect the thing I gain from my struggles. The more I respect the thing I gain from my struggles, the greater the value of the thing I have gained, at least from my perspective. If you have been reading all my posts up to this point, you will already know that I consider value to be something we each apply to things in this world. In other words, the Corolla that my parents owned before they gave it to me was likely of great value to them, as they had to work hard to earn that car. However, for me, the Corolla had very little value as I did not have to struggle for it very much at all. Struggle is part of a process that assigns value to things.
Earlier in this post, I mentioned suffering from Buddhism, and suggested it had a relationship with struggle. Suffering, as I understand it, is not a negative (nor positive) thing either. Suffering is simply a state of being unsettled. To become a buddha, one needs to no longer be in a state of suffering. To put this another way, a buddha is no longer in a state of change. Suffering is related to changing, like being in a state of flux. If you look around you, you will likely appreciate that everything in this world is in a state of change. There is no permanence in this world. We may want there to be permanence in things, but really, everything in this world is impermanent. The ground is eroding through the movement of air and water, our bodies are undergoing countless chemical and mechanical changes, the siding on my house is wearing down and will eventually need to be replaced or repainted. Everything is changing. We are changing. We are thus suffering. To be a buddha, we need to bring ourselves into a state of no longer changing, no longer suffering. The acts we take in our attempts to end suffering are struggles.
I feel like I may have overdone it in this post. Really, all I wanted to describe was what I take struggling to be. I consider it to be an incredibly important thing. Struggling is one of the important ways I generate value in my world. I work very hard, and put a lot of effort into, the things that I consider of greatest value. My relationships with other people are probably the best example of this.
Relationships, as I see them, are not static or unchanging things either. I must put effort into my relationships in order to generate the value in those relationships. The more effort I put in, the greater the value the relationship has for me. But relationships do not simply get to a state of unchangingness. Relationships change and evolve, just like everything else in this world. Thus, not only do I need to put a significant amount of effort into my relationships to begin with, in order to generate their significant value to me, I must also continue to put significant amounts of effort into my relationships on an ongoing basis. Relationships are about struggle. The more I struggle in my relationships, the greater those relationships are.
An example of what I am taking about. When I was in high school, I dated someone whom I still, to this day, consider very special. I know that that relationship is long since passed, and I do not expect to ever be in a relationship like it again, but it was special and I will always remember it. Why it was so special was the shear amount of struggle I had to put into the relationship. My parents did not want me to have a relationship with this person, and this person’s parents did not want them to have a relationship with me. We both had to fight our respective parents, and our respective friends, in order to maintain our relationship. It very much was a Romeo and Juliet sort of relationship. We both agreed that we wanted to be together, and so we both struggled very hard for the relationship. Of course, like the tragedy by Shakespeare, it also collapsed in equally fantastic fashion. I blame myself for what occurred, but the truth is we both had our respective parts to play.
The point of all of this is simply that struggle is a key and important aspect of my life. Struggle represents all the effort I put into everything, and the value that I assign to my world though all that effort. In my next post, I will discuss how sacrifice and struggle work together, and why I consider them the greatest realization for me.