Relief after hardship as Food after hunger

by Panchamee Hewavissenti

Punch your thoughts in to [email protected]

World is full of various types of suffering. We have to live a life with hardships, suffering, sorrows, lamentations, pains and despair. Is your soul afflicted with hardships, burdens and problems due to a particular reason?

Is your soul subjected to the internal battle of feelings? Never let a catastrophe depress you, frustrate you or exasperate you as every human being is subjected to hardships.

Those who are principled and walking on the correct path are not shaken by hardships. Instead hardships help them to strengthen their resolve and they use hardships like a rocket fuel.

When a weak hearted person face adversity or trouble, he experiences an aggravated level but for a brave hearted person, adversity plays beneficial effect to reshape his/her life.

If you desire for yourself a life of stability and bliss, try and face all situations with bravery and perseverance. In order to be more resolute than your situations and more horrible than the storms of catastrophe, you have to possess an intrepid and firm heart.

Weak hearted ones can never do that for they're always horrified and shaken by smallest of tremors.

Don't be crushed by trifles

Many people are shaken and distressed not by the matters with great impact, but by minor issues with less importance. It's not at all wise to be preoccupied with hardships that have slightest significance. If you follow this, you will find later that you will be left alone by most of your griefs.

Some people offer trivial adversities a considerably bigger space in their lives. The problems with their stomachs, vehicles and houses. Some are distressed day and night over trifle issues such as disagreement with their spouses which may finally lead to a divorce, a disappointment with children, colleagues, subordinates, leaders, relatives or because of a criticism or some other triviality.

These kind of people don't have higher aspirations or goals in their lives to keep them busy enough to pave their way to achieve them. And they have no noble ambitions in this life which can keep them striving day and night towards achieving them.

"When water leaves the container, it's then filled with air". So when you leave noble views and firm thoughts from your soul it's filled with anxiety. Then your soul is prone to be invaded by whatever calamities over which worthy or unworthy grievance is caused.

Psychologists view that you should judge everything in proportion to the true value and then place it in its proper place. So give in to each circumstance according to its size, weight, measure and importance.

Pain can be a blessing

Pain always doesn't deserve to be considered as a negative force or to be repulsed. At times you'll really benefit feeling pain.

When you feel a pain your soul tends to be remedied by the spiritual blessedness, and to do some meritorious acts to the verge of religious concepts. When you're undergoing a pain you seek refuge from whatever creed you've placed your trust on. You'll be closer to the spiritualism which eventually cure your pain and make your soul exalted.

When a student keeps on studying, he often has to go through pangs of heavy burden. Yet ultimately he harvests the fruits of his burden. It's a burden and a pain at the beginning but a glint at the end. The aches and pangs of passion, the poverty and scorn of others, the frustration and anger at injustice - all these cause to strengthen your self confidence.

Feel the hardship in order to speak from the heart

If you like to be a successfull poet, you're not supposed to live a sole life of roses and pleasant things. If the poet himself doesn't feel the pain in his heart, in his nerves and in his blood, he fails utterly at the attempt of being a poet, of course a good poet. If he feels all kinds of pains, as a result he is able to infuse the same emotions in to others hearts of through his work.

We enjoy great poetry, novels, short stories, dramas but we never know how much hardship the author himself had gone through. We simply say "that's a great poem, It's a marvellous novel" etc.

But the author might have faced tyrannised and bitter situations, which helped him immensely to come out with such a great work. It's interesting to note that how many painful experiences the writers have undergone, which inspired brilliant works.

Similarly the poet who has never sipped the taste of bitter disappointment does invariably produce heaps upon heaps of tastless words. That's sheerly because his words are pouring from his tongue not from his inner feelings and emotions.

Many of the poems are passionless without life or soul. The reason as I feel is that those poets never endured hardships that inevitably sharpen their intellectual calibre and beautify their thoughts. They are encompassed with comfort. Thereby the works of such authors are cold like glaciers of ice.

Some politicians in Sri lanka are unable to shake a hair on the body of listeners when they speak and lack an atom's weight of impact and truth. Because they don't speak with emotions, feelings and sentiments, in other words hardships, pains and suffering.

Those are just words of deception.

Beneficial effects of hardships

A person whose life is full of comfort and respite and who is not hurt by hardships or who has never been crushed by a calamity will surely be an inefficient, unprolific, lazy and lethargic person.

Great religious leaders ever existed on earth always delivered passionate sermons. That's why people always gathered around them in a great number. The words of a great sermon reached the innermost depth of heart and penetrated to the deepest region of the soul of people. Because those religious leaders attained greatness through pain and suffering, the necessary concomitant of a life.

They had been bounded by the bitter reality of poverty, of rejection, of abuse, of banishment from home and the country, of pains, of injuries, of torture, of un availability of pleasure. The muscles of their stomachs were crinkled owing to hunger. They're the elite of mankind. They're models of purity, nobility and sacrifice.

Hardships help you in a wondrous way in strengthening your heart. Can you remember the way you faced an unbearably bitter situation with courage and patience.

The courage that never became manifest from your life till you afflicted with hardship. Through hardships your soul will be affluent with courage and patience.

Hardships - atonements for sins

At times when I've to face hardships I believe that it's an atonement for my sin. It was a rainy day and due to the break down of our office vehicle I had to go to work by bus.

I was already late and in a hurry to get down, I rang the bell while nearing my office and the driver didn't stop the bus. But, after constant ringing of the bell, he stopped the bus half a kilometre away from the office at a place where no buses or trishaws were available.

I had to walk to the office in the rain. Imagine how difficult and irritating it was. I said to myself "I've to forebear this situation. Because this can be an atonement for a wrong thing I've done. This is ok, what if I had to face something worse than this".

While on my way to work I was thinking where I'd done something wrong or harmed anyone previous day. Then I could remember I spoke to one of my executives without giving him his due respect. But that person was extremely kind enough to treat me in a humane manner.

I'm grateful to hardships for saving me from that which is greater than the hardship I underwent.

Prophet Muhammad once said "worry, anxiety, pain, fatigue, sickness or even thorn that pricks him - when a man is afflicted with any of these, Allah grants him pardon, for some of his sins through or because of that affliction".

Relief comes after hardship

This is a constant pattern of life of man as simply as the light of day comes after the dark of night. Also hardship before comfort is analogous to hunger before food. Food comes at a time when it has its greater effect on the taste buds.

Lord Buddha attained enlightenment-Buddhahood, after having spent his life in austerity. His stomach had been pasted to his back bone, because he didn't partake any food. He used to quench his thirst by putting his tongue out when it rained.

Jesus Christ is the classical example of resurgence after adversity. Christianity was widely accepted and people started practising it after Jesus had been crucified. Plato, one of the greatest philosophers once said. "Hardship is as beneficial to the soul as it's unwelcome in one's life. Comfort is as harmful to the soul as it's welcome in life".

Of course hardship is more beneficial to the soul of man than are comfort and ease. Verily, the greatness of relief is proportionate to the greatness of the hardship. Don't lament over the vicissitudes of your normal happy life. You can't evade hardship. Human life involves work and responsibilities.

This world is a trial by which noblest people are produced. If it weren't so, the world would have been like heavens.

This world never was a comfortable place for the best of men - Noah's own people scorned and ridiculed him, Abraham was put in the fire and commanded to slaughter his own son, Jacob was separated from his son and wept until he lost his sight, Mosses endured tyranny of Pharaoh and afterwards the disobedience of his own people. Through hardships they became noblest of all.

Regardless it's greatness and far-reachability, hardship persists or lasts. Rather the hardship and more difficult your situations become, the closer you come to ease, comfort and relief.

Is not the end of every dark night a bright morning?