Pain is hard to avoid, but suffering is a choice

Haruki Murakami’s words that occasionally come to mind whenever things get hard.

There have been a lot of things lately that could cause various kinds of pain. Difficult work at the company. The index finger on my left hand, burned while cooking. The experience of gasping for breath while running.

Among these, there’s pain I encountered unexpectedly, but also pain I brought upon myself. The suffocating feeling from running 10km after deliberately driving an hour and a half to Chuncheon was pain I chose for myself.

I think it’s hard to learn without going through hardship. When things don’t go the way I want at work, it’s frustrating, but I gain the lesson that “this isn’t the way to do it.” When I burned the index finger on my left hand, it hurt like crazy, but I learned never to hold a pan that way again.

Sometimes the memory of the lesson fades and only the memory of the pain remains… but I believe that most pain eventually leads to learning.

If it’s pain I can learn from, I don’t want to turn it away.