Sometimes life has to be hard so that you can appreciate the moment when it’s easy…
What have diets given me, or why do I put myself through bodybuilding at all? I’ve been asked this many times. It may sound strange, but effort, pain and suffering have given me a lot. As the poets say: “Hard times are our best teachers!” Thanks to the pre-contest “fasting”, my whole outlook on the world has changed enormously. Going through suffering, and doing without good things for periods of time, has helped me grow a great deal mentally. I’d put it this way: in hard times I see and sense the life around me far more accurately than in good times or when I’m sitting in my comfort zone. I start to appreciate and understand values that I might otherwise not grasp so well. I’ve developed the ability to see what the real problems are, and what aren’t really worries or problems at all. You’ve surely heard it said that the joy of giving is much greater than the joy of receiving. That’s true, and I often experience it precisely when there’s little on my plate and I can’t eat much. It’s not simply a case of “can’t eat myself, so I lug treats to others.” No, I just feel the urge to do something good for others, to give, to make gifts, and especially while suffering myself I feel a particular joy when I see how happy my gift, or a treat brought home for the kids, makes them.
I also feel, see and experience what nonsense people waste their money on. On one hand that has long been known, but I link it largely to the realization of how little a person actually needs to live normally, to function normally or to be happy. Both mentally and physically. It’s unbelievable what joy and experience 20 grams of sour cream can give on top of 200 grams of plain, unflavored low-fat cottage cheese.
Is it possible to feel joy and contentment without pain and suffering? Perhaps it is, but I’m deeply convinced that this only holds in the short term, and definitely not in the longer run. The writer John Green has said: “The existence of broccoli doesn’t affect in any way what chocolate tastes like!” It certainly sounds good and may seem logical at first, but in my view it’s more of a demagogic, invalid slogan. Pure wordplay. True, it’s hardly the case that the taste of lettuce or the existence of broccoli somehow determines WHAT chocolate tastes LIKE. But there’s not the slightest doubt that bland beans, that same broccoli, or kohlrabi as the staple of your menu for months on end affect HOW chocolate tastes. “WHAT IT’S LIKE” versus “HOW” depends on how you interpret it, how you translate it. There’s no doubt that, factually, chocolate remains a dessert and a treat, but how good that treat tastes, and how it STARTS TO TASTE after months of dieting and eating bland food, needs no scientific proof, since it’s something you simply have to live through yourself. In fact, the factual question of what a given food tastes like in itself isn’t even important here. What we’re talking about is that, to know what is good, you have to experience something different (bad, uncomfortable, unpleasant) for a while too. In the end, everything comes down to relativity. How someone perceives something depends on what environment we come from, what frame of reference we compare things against, and how saturated we are with something or someone. This applies to absolutely everything. What would being happy mean if we had never experienced being unhappy, or if we didn’t know what the so-called “ordinary feeling” or “just being” means? There is no black without white, no good without bad, no warm without cold, and so on. These extremes exist, and they are different and relative for each of us. But it’s also clear that to perceive and define one extreme, you have to feel its opposite too. If it’s always good and comfortable, then very soon that good and comfortable becomes boring and is no longer good and comfortable. So don’t be afraid of suffering and hardship: again and again they help refresh the ordinary state of well-being, idle moment or comfort zone, which tends to devalue quickly. This touches absolutely every area of life. Really, the whole of life, progress and development works through experiencing opposites, experiencing them again and learning from them. So don’t be afraid to suffer: a double cheeseburger from Statoil tastes many times different and better after months of dieting than when you eat it day after day. It teaches us to appreciate what is already good and reminds us that there’s no need to always rush toward new things. Suffering teaches us to take joy in simple things. If you always had to move at a run, think how good it is when you can occasionally move at a walk, even for just a few minutes. After all, you can’t keep moving forward all the time; at some point you hit a limit and have to start finding joy again in old, long-existing things, activities, states, whatever they may be!
Also see Janar’s thread on the Forum!
Author: Janar Rückenberg
Come and train! ArtGym
