With Whom Would You Like to Suffer?

I’ve been evaluating my circle lately. The pain of the human experience touches us all and I’m trying to understand my responsibility in various types of interpersonal relationships. In this current season of life, I present as an avoidant in most relationships. 

This means when things get muddy, hurtful, or unclear, I prefer to run away than towards the issues. I’m not proud of that, but I’m (more) conscious of it and I’m working on it. 

Surely, you’ve got your fair share of interpersonal struggle. Some of that is your responsibility and some isn’t. That’s a fact that we all are sitting in. As it turns out, the amount of responsibility that’s mine is specifically always more than I’d care to admit. Nonetheless, here we are. 

I don’t know the answer to how to best navigate the pain of the human experience, but this seems true at the moment and so I’m sharing it with you. On some level, this inevitable pain and struggle means that we’re basically choosing who we’d like to suffer with.

This is true at work, in your family, and in your personal life. 

And, when you look at it like that, things can become more clear. It’s not the absence of pain and conflict that we ought to be after, but, rather, that we keep choosing the people we’d like to suffer with. 

After all, that’s what we’ll be doing..