Suffering is Inevitable

“History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived; but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.”
– Maya Angelou

Suffering – It is inevitable! The universe maintains itself in a harmonic equilibrium by offering everything with a polar contradiction. Day and night, hope and despair, storms and sunshine, and pretty much everything else. This is a universal phenomenon – that in order to bask in the glory of something, you will also have to face the hideous side of it. Everything comes as a combo package of good and bad, and you can either accept it entirely or lose it all. This might sound quite distressing, but this is exactly how we learn the value of something – by getting a bitter taste of what it would be like to not have something at all in the first place. This is how we learn the value of something.  

If your present is good, there’s a good chance you have had your share of suffering in the past. The sunshine always peeps from the silver lining of clouds. No matter how hideous it was, no matter what you had to suffer, and no matter how you made it through, your adversities and tribulations have now become a thing of the past, and a bright new present has dawned upon you.  

You cannot go back and change something that should not have happened. You cannot deny it either. Your pain and suffering is a concrete reality that might still make a shiver go down your spine. But, the good thing about it is that sooner or later, it eventually ends. And while you cannot possibly erase its traces from your life, the encouraging thing to note is that you wouldn’t have to relive it either.  

It is important to accept our past and embrace the darker aspects of our history. This does not mean holding on to bygones and forgetting to live in the present. It means learning from the suffering of your past and constructing a better present and future out of it. The rule applies to our personal as well as professional lives.  

On a broader scale, with an understating of the history and past, a struggling nation paves its way toward greatness and glory. It is essential for a nation to stay connected to its roots, and impart its historic legacy and heritage to its coming generations, to remind them where they actually hail from. The idea is not to repeat the history all over again, or to make the younger ones get a taste of what their ancestors suffered in the past. It is to make them understand the mistakes that were made in the past, and how they can prevent them from happening in the future.  

The Black History Month is an annual commemoration to learn and recall how we as a nation have survived, grown, and evolved – fighting the menacing challenge of racism, segregation, and acquiring civil rights. The objective behind the black history week is to develop a realistic idea about our history in young minds, and lay the foundation for a future that is secure, prosperous, and brighter than the past.