How to Enjoy Life...the Art of Endurance

"What we must revive, in these mechanical days, is the soul’s power of detaching itself from everything, and enjoying its life in spite of everything. Circumstances we can seldom change. Money-worries, love-worries, ambition-worries, health-worries, unemployment-worries we all have to endure. They are there; and we— we are there!  To suffer physical suffering, to lose our days in meaningless drudgery, to have decisions to make, people to cajole, people to threaten, people to cheat and to be cheated by, fruitless hateful encounters with people who are more alien to us than archangels or waterflies- these things are simply life. Only an infinitesimal number of creatures ever, by the divine favour of the gods, escape these things.   

To suffer something or other, to have to face something or other, this is simply to live.  This is what life is.  If you cannot deal with this, you cannot deal with life.  If you cannot derive some sort of secret personal thrill from dodging all this and in spite of all this, you had better commit suicide.  It is far better to be dead than to live miserably.  Most of us are afraid to commit suicide, and yet we are too spiritless, too lacking in resolution and in faith in ourselves, to make, so to speak, the sign of the “Pentagon” and call the earth-forces to our aid! We go about like galvanised puppets.  And all the time, from the silent chemistry of the air, from the invisible magnetism of the earth, there could be called to our assistance, if we only had faith enough to make the necessary psychic motion, streams of mysterious planetary force. 

There is not any old, bent, twisted tree that has not found a way by some occult instinct to, endure its sufferings under heat and cold and storms.  As Matthew Arnold most truly says, everything in Nature—rocks and stones and trees alike—has an air of enduring rather than of rejoicing. They are enduring rather than rejoicing; and so are we. All living things, from infusoria and amoebae to the most godlike man, suffer pain, in this our life, and have to learn certain psychic tricks of enduring or forgetting pain."

 (John Cowper Powys, In Defence of Sensuality)