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The Alchemy of Suffering: Turning Heartache Into Art

Saying yes to life as an act of courage

Josh Chandler Morris
Change Your Mind Change Your Life
5 min readOct 22, 2024

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Photo by I.am_nah on Unsplash

‘Your life is your life, don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission. Be on the watch, there are ways out.’ — Charles Bukowski

It is easy to be a nihilist. The ever-evolving tragedies of global politics and their real human consequences can lead us to a point of apathy and surrender. Furthermore, at some point, loss and darkness will touch every one of our lives. As we navigate oceans of grief, we can be overcome; we can lose all sense of meaning and purpose. At this point, it can become hard to understand why we should carry on at all. Life is precarious; it guarantees suffering and hardship but also its opposite. To be alive is to drift between these polarities, and as many learn, in these darkest times, we are presented with a choice: a yes or no to life.

A Search for Meaning

In 1942, Viktor Frankl sat in a German concentration camp, his life’s work had been burned, his wife, brother and father killed and the child that he had fathered had been aborted by force by the Nazis. He led the kind of life you could forgive for falling into defeated nihilism.

Yet he didn’t. He found meaning in the book that he would write all over again from scratch. This provided him with the…

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Change Your Mind Change Your Life
Change Your Mind Change Your Life

Published in Change Your Mind Change Your Life

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Josh Chandler Morris
Josh Chandler Morris

Written by Josh Chandler Morris

A jeweller by day, writer by night. Exploring Eastern philosophy, spirituality and politics. Creator of The Inspiration Journal www.harshrealm.co.uk

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