Without Pain, There Is No Meaning

​When given a safe place to talk about hard stories, people will often choose to tell their hardest stories.

Yesterday, I wrote about an experience I participated in at a training I helped lead last week. The participants were given a prompt to share a hard story in their life with a partner. It's important to note that at this point we'd spent 16 hours together.

There was a strong sense of safety and bonding amongst us.

I've participated in this particular experience in this training several times. And it always amazes me that when prompted to share a hard story, people often reach for their hardest story. Quite often a story they've never or rarely ever shared before.

Why is that?

Arthur Brooks says that in large groups of people, you find that when you ask them about the meaning of their life, they always talk about their more challenging times.

Our identity is largely influenced by what we've been through, what we've been able to navigate ourselves through. We often learn much more about who we are not by what comes our way, but by the things we overcome that are standing in our way.

Achievements are good at answering what we've done. But suffering is always asking me who I am becoming.

The promotion, the championship, the degree, the award—they become nice chapters in my life story. But divorce, addiction, betrayal, the diagnosis, the loss of a loved one—these moments are always the ones that ask the most important questions.

Who am I now?

What becomes of me when everything I've depended on is no longer dependable?

Is there any way possible to make anything good of this?

I think this is why people reach for their hardest moments when asked to simply share a hard moment. Not because it's the most painful moment, but because it's the moment that taught them the most.

The most about life. The most about themselves.

It is a great irony in many ways. We spend so much of our lives trying to avoid suffering, and yet, when we're asked to look for meaning in our lives we instinctively turn to our stories of suffering. The stories we are often most afraid to tell are often the stories that taught us who we are.

The magical part of life is that when we find the safe place to share them, the people to share them with, those places are filled with learning far beyond self.

The meaning of life is found in our shared sufferings.

I have experienced this time and time again.

I'm afraid I have lived long enough to know that pain is never going away. And I have also lived long enough to know that was never the plan in the first place.

Without pain, there is not meaning.