In truth, there aren’t a whole lot of people that willingly desire to volunteer for pain or suffering. Most people, aren’t interested in embracing either pain or suffering, and therefore most people desire to avoid such, to the degree that they are able to do so. Further to the point, many people, believe that ideally a life without pain and suffering is the best life possible, and perhaps in certain ways, it is. That said, what many a person seems to forget when it comes to pain and suffering is that each one of us, in order to have our character truly be tested in the trials of life, must go through challenges, in which some of those challenges so presented to us, are going to involve some degree of pain, disappointment, or suffering.
Firstly, we need to take into account that the greatest dramas that we experience when watching a given movie or reading an engaging novel, involves some degree within that story of not only conflict, but also some degree of pain and suffering that goes along with such; that the hero thereof, must thereby overcome, through their unrelenting personal effort, in order to gain something of substance and of value at the end. In other words, if all the movies that we watched and books that we read, never involved the overcoming of obstacles, including invariably suffering from setbacks that consisted of pain, disappointment, and suffering, we wouldn’t have any real interest in the story, because it would not grip us, the way that a novel about injustice, for instance, and the overcoming of such, does.
Secondly, we need to take a closer look at ourselves, to understand better who and what we really are. After all, all those that are birthed upon this planet, are the very same people, that sooner or later, will physically die, in one way or another, of which, many a death can be viewed upon as being tragic, or sad, or unwarranted, or undesired. Yet, all of us will die a physical death; but in that physical death, it must also be noted, that we shed our physical encasement at that point of death, to thereby fully reembrace that which is our eternal essence, for we are spirit and have always been so.
This thus signifies that one of the reasons why each one of us, will suffer from some sort of ill or disappointment in our lives, and perhaps suffer from such, repeatedly, and even tragically, is for this to represent for us, a “thorn in our side;” so that we do not make the foundational error of overidentifying exclusively with our physical form, over our spiritual form. Additionally, those that are fortunate enough to seemingly never suffer from any pain or disappointment, were such as this to continue, would indeed have a very strong tendency to become complacent in their attitude, and thereby incapable of demonstrating empathetic feelings to the other, for having themselves, never suffered.
We are meant to suffer, not necessarily as punishment for what we have done wrong or have been in error, about; but primarily as a way and means to remind us that we should not overly identify with our body and our bodily needs, for these are truly temporal; so that, such pain that we meet is there to awaken or re-awaken our conscience to understand better that this world is best seen as a proving ground, and those that use their pain and suffering to eradicate the cobwebs from their mind, to embrace therefore their spiritual immortality and to discount, the importance or worth, of that which is mortal, have got it right.