Struggle as a Positive Sign
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the concept of struggling. More specifically, how we can use the presence of struggle as an indicator that we’re doing something right.
Rehashing a common theme from these posts, one of the aspects of Chelsea’s life that made her so admirable was the fact that she did struggle with some significant questions. She had a great job as a professor and made significant impacts on students and colleagues; her students raved about how Chelsea empowered them to learn new things and tinker with new technologies; her colleagues raved about how inspiring she was as a model scholar and professional. Clearly, Chelsea was doing something right in her job, but she still struggled with whether this job was the best use of her talents. The world is literally on fire (that’s what happens in the summer time on the west coast) and she wondered whether she should ditch her gig and go work on climate change, or work as a medical doctor on front-line conflicts. So we spent a lot of time trying to reconcile what it means to be a good person living in a troubled world, which brings with it struggles about our responsibility to make the world better. As two very privileged individuals, we knew that we had to put our privilege to work, but the question of how to do so most effectively was a difficult one.
So Chelsea struggled in her life, but she struggled with the right questions which, again, was one of her more admirable qualities. Thinking about her has made me think about how the presence of struggle might actually serve as an indicator that we’re doing something right, and the absence of struggle as an indicator that maybe we’re not thinking about something we’re supposed to be.
This concept has immediate ties to my grieving process, not surprisingly: I struggle daily with big questions about my identity, my life moving forward, my relationship to my daughter, and (just to keep things lite) the nature of existence. A year ago, I’m not sure whether I would have thought of such struggles as indicators of productive endeavors-I might have even thought of them as signs that I should shift my focus, or that I was moving in the wrong direction. While I am an analytical person, I do still detect the presence of flow/harmony at times, and struggle could serve as an indicator that my life was out of balance (at the risk of butchering the Taoist concept of wu-wei, I sort of thought of flow as an indicator that you were on the right path). Now, I think a little differently about the concept of struggle, and that its presence suggests that maybe I’m doing something right.
In reality, this is probably a ‘both/and’ situation: struggle can serve both as an indicator that you’re asking the right questions and as an indicator that you’re out of balance/harmony. But it’s helpful for me now to ask whether the struggle I’m experiencing is a healthy sign; I don’t just immediately discount the struggle, I think/reflect on it.
This whole discourse may also be a rehashing/reframing of the idea of growing pains, or stepping outside of one’s comfort zone; still, it’s helpful to think about how those concepts look different in different contexts.
I’ll write more about this next time, but one my current struggles involves trying to maintain my optimism amidst the turbulence of life. I believe strongly in the power of authentic, or pragmatic optimism, which is an optimistic view that takes into account the complexities of the world (contrast that with a sort of performative optimism, common on social media, that looks really nice but lacks depth). Not surprisingly, that viewpoint is hard to maintain under normal circumstances, much less the one-two punch of covid and grief. So I struggle to maintain my authentic optimism. But, applying the above framework, I can think of this struggle as a positive sign that maybe I’m asking the right questions, or sitting with the right emotions. Not sure what the struggle may yield, but it’s helpful to think that the struggle has merit.
