Hardships. Emotionally draining, undesirable, and relentless. These factors may cause those to stray away from wishing such an experience, surely no one in their right mind would wish for periods of sorrow and insanity whether it be grief, personal fault, events, or public hate.

Despite this, are hardships okay to experience?

In elaborating hardships, there was this quote I had read in Siddhartha that provided a silver lining to what it was:

“He had been captured by the world, by lust, covetousness, sloth, and finally also by that vice which he had used to despise and mock the most as the most foolish one of all vices: greed. Property, possessions, and riches also had finally captured him; they were no longer a game and trifles to him, had become a shackle and a burden.”

To provide context, Siddhartha had become rather financially improved through taking upon business and trade, deeming him wealthy. Through wealth, he was able to access many things that he couldn’t before when he was rather scarce in funds such as lust, gambling, exotic foods, personal belongings, and riches. But in the end, these factors had grew hold of him, and it turned him into a person that fell blind off his wisdom, a feral and incompetent person that began to see things as nuisances instead of mere obstacles.

You may ask, if he’s going through such a life with prosperity and happiness, then what’s why did he fell ill into becoming such a poor witted person. It’s because with financial stability, lust, food, riches, estates, jewels, and popularity, your quality of life improves, and when you are having a decent life, it’s hard to have hardships. Back to the word, hardship.

In Siddhartha through the first initial chapters, Siddhartha was built upon a life of needing to beg for food everyday, needing to train constantly to be able to endure the pain of starvation and thirst, needing to seek out every page of a book to surge it of it’s wisdom and knowledge, something he loved more than his family. These are all considered hardships, that Siddhartha had suffered but eventually had honed himself to be able to conjure a resistance against these problems. Hardships is what tore down the weak Siddhartha, and built a stronger one in result.

By experiencing greed and riches that he had fought so hard to avoid, he begins to lose his experience of hardships, that made him into the wise, passionate, and dependable person that people knew him as. He was essentially losing his old identity and transforming into a new person that began to rage at problems he was able to simply brush off before.

To be honest, I don’t like the idea. No one really does but the idea is very true. The reality is that the world is benevolent of it’s warmth but daunting of it’s coldness. The sun comes up and it goes down, night comes up and it disappears. The point of this is that the world does not stop time for you. It will keep becoming warm, and cold, then warm, and cold, that is the natural law. Whether you experience memories of joy or events of discord, you will need to just simply bite the bullet and move on for the better. When the sun comes up, it has came up, there is nothing you can do about it to warp or rewrite the fact, just like how when a past event has happened, you cannot do anything about the past. You can only move on, and that is how Siddhartha and many people in this world fare with tragedies in turning them into experiences of wisdom, instead of daggers of trauma.

So every time you are experiencing a mishap, small or big, long or short, pinch or stab, do it not cast it aside. In the end, Siddhartha was able to quit his habits and simply run away from the city, reborn once again as a passionate nomad who travels to seek wisdom and knowledge where once again he embraces his hardships. Even if the pain is unbearable, know that it is not unnecessary. Hardships are what allow you to retain your identity, personality, and your personal strength that provides you resist such pain or fault again if you were to run into hardships again. They are like a vaccine, comforting your weak immune system when entered and then reinforcing it to become stronger to the same type of mistakes, symptoms, or illnesses when it leaves.

So yeah, hardships are okay.