We spend so much time in this perpetual effort to mitigate the things that cause us to suffer. And it is perpetual, never ending, unattainable and hopeless.

We are all born into a vehicle with two broken wheels. The first is our propensity toward self pity, ever driving us to focus inequitably on our misfortune. Our pain is always louder than our pleasure. Though so many gifts are ruined by coincident misfortune, there is rarely a misfortune we can ruin with a gift.

The second is the inability to maintain a consistent appreciation for the things that make us smile. What was once a treasure is now a trinket. What was once a miracle has been transmuted into the mundane as it’s secrets are unraveled, and it’s plain reality replaces it’s once glorious mystery.

Such a view may trick us all into thinking that we may just be made to suffer. Though brutal in it’s implications, it is the truth, as the truth so often is. Reality does not suffer any pretenses to kindness. Nature is not predisposed to nurture; only to select.

With the sharpest razor she endeavors only to separate; to draw an uncrossable boundary between those in whom the will “to be” supplants the indifference in any who even dare consider not being. This is not a question. This is the law.

The line designs to separate the complacent from the fit, where fitness itself encodes it’s own requirement; that “to be” is a privilege earned. Earned in the fight! Earned in the fury of a life in which we starve until we harvest, in which we watch until we can’t and then we sleep until the fear of no-to-being drives our eyes back open. We creep through a hierarchy of eyes and ears. We chase the biggest ears and smallest eyes and run from those who seem to have no ears at all. We run until collapse or fight until we’ve proven worthy of the life we live today. Then tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.

In the endless world of the real, any glimpse of comfort we achieve is a gift. A gift that we have chased and hunted down as though some day we might permanently posses it. But every gift of comfort won, sees its satisfaction dissolved by our own caustic sense of perpetual entitlement.

We have built our little worlds in which comfort is so normal that we have fooled ourselves into believing that it is the expectation. Deprived of comfort, our entire existence becomes subjected to a question of whether or not an uncomfortable existence is worth our time.

So I would ask you where to find it and how long it’s there; to imagine perfect comfort, then to imagine how long you might manage to stick around. How long it takes to find a hole in the illusion through which you peek to see a greater comfort resting just within your grasp. The second you reach for it you’ve failed. You understand the nature of the arsenic in the apple seed; that all deliciousness is laced with poison.

Comfort breeds apathy. Apathy invites destruction. These are the downstroke in the story we all know, in which strong men have made good times, and those good times have made weak men. As these weak men continue the cycle, we must advocate for our own strength, and so we must endure discomfort until our need for comfort breaks; until we shift our eyes down, back to the grounded acceptance of comfortable suffering. Accept the trade. Make the compromise. Invite the reaper in so that he may serve to remind you of the privilege you neglect and the comforts you enjoy but never earned.

P.S. As I write this I can see how this may be used as an invitation to abuse. Shame on my despicable soul for believing for a second that these truths may serve as justification for the discomfort I cause others. The invitation of *natural suffering entails the striving required to maintain a natural life. My arrogance and involuntary cruelty are not excused by their potential contribution to another’s acceptance of nature’s cruel tests, which are numerous enough without my adding to the pile.