At its most fundamental, Nature always seems
to deliver opposites, some of them contradictory, some complementary.
Electrons and Protons in matter. Positive poles and negative
poles in electricity. North and South poles in magnetism. Male
and female in animal life. Even the 10 Commandments are a mix
- albeit unequal – of "shalts" and "shalt
nots"!
All of which might make one suspicious of the modern trend that
seeks to promote and espouse only positive experiences and eliminate
the negative! Painful experiences, it insists, should be avoided
like the plague and our children protected from them at all costs.
What a dreadful mistake! In our efforts to edit pain out of
life, we ignore the positive purposes for which pain exists.
We make desperate attempts to shield our young from every possible
suffering, and in so doing neglect to equip them for the adult
world they must ultimately enter. Our society has failed to distinguish
unnecessary, detrimental sufferings from the many necessary but
painful experiences, which are conducive to growth and maturity
and need to be embraced.
Children have to be taught the positive
value of many sufferings. How, otherwise, can they or any of
us learn to pick ourselves
up after a fall? How can we come to be able to deal with the
inevitable rejections and denials that life demands of us, if
our elders have always run scared of saying "No"!
The Prophet (by Kahlil Gibran) speaks
of joy and sorrow as "inseparable". "Together
they come" he says, "and when one sits alone with you
at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed." We
need to be bred to cope with this reality.
The plea, here, is not to put suffering on a pedestal, but to
restore a healthy balance of the positive and negative in life.
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