Challenges in life make you tough
We're all somehow wired to try to look for the most comfortable life:
- Five-star hotels where the sun is shining outside, but you're indoors cooled by AC
- All-inclusive food and drinks where you just need to snap your fingers and they'll bring anything you want
Yet we grow little or next-to-nothing by having a comfortable life.
In this sense, I think my children are by far the biggest and best thing that has ever happened in my life. Not just because they're amazing, but if I can be truly honest, perhaps the main reason is how much the hardships of being a parent with no support from our families living thousands of KMs away, and most of my non-parent friends mostly disappearing from my life (99% of my friends -- I live in a country who fights head to head with the lowest birthrate in the world).
Yet my wife and I continue to deal with hardships, in the earlier days I would think of how I can make more money to "buy myself out of hardships", or move to a country where the government mostly takes care of your hardships (spoiler alert: after I spent extensive years researching this, I think that would be a terrible place to live).
But yesterday, amid a few hardships I had, I managed to read a bit on the kindle app on my phone, waste a bit of time doomscrolling on interesting (yet unimportant) facts (like for example, a bucket of water that people put their hand in which is set at the temperature of the Ocean when the Titanic Sank, apparently -2 because of the salt), and so on.
After that, I fell asleep quite deeply, something that would have never happened when my son was small and we had hardships, in fact I could hardly sleep at that time. Many months when he woke up with night terrors, him fearing for his life and me fearing for his, I slept only a handful of hours, 2 or 3 hours every night. Every day for months.
I write this as it's been many years since then, but I really couldn't handle it and was borderline going to break down. I can hardly believe I once went through those difficult experiences.
But time and again I realize that difficult times shape us, make us stronger, and, as much as we want to avoid them like the plague, it's precisely because of them that life has a meaning. Weird.