[YS Lounge] Life Remains a Struggle If You Do Not Perceive It as a Challenge

Happiness is an oasis. We can live there, we can move past. We live in demanding times, challenging times. There is no guarantee of either safety or of insured happiness. Stalking us are terrorists with bombs, fanatics with passion, drivers with vehicles, and roads with potholes. We survive not so much by design, as by accident. In short, life is a struggle. Life is also a challenge.

Life remains a struggle if you do not perceive it as a challenge. Once you begin to believe that your life is not a cosmic gift voucher, you resign to the reality that the struggle has hidden prizes. It is the pessimist or the defeatist who looks at struggle as a curse, however if you are not a fatalist you can still design the vagaries of life and proceed to make more of "life" than of "struggle". The short question is the choice you make: does life deal with struggles or do struggles lead to life.

Men who matter choose the latter. Reading under streetlights is not just a romantic story of the rags to riches tale. It is a reflection of a choice that the struggles of life make better human beings out of us. From selling kites to flying high is often not just a process of struggle, it can the story of life. Speaking for myself, when I made my first international trip and the flight took off the runway, I peeped out of the window for kites I had sold in the beginning of my entrepreneurial journey. I have struggled, I had lived.

Life would not be worth its while if it came on a platter. I still savor the moments of struggle. Each struggle has taught me lessons in endurance. Animals exist, men live. Animals survive because they are subject to the whims of the environment. Men live because from the environ and the struggles of its whims, he learns, he adjusts.

Living is about mixing your passion with compassion and understanding the mileage you can make out of the struggles. The statement that life is a struggle is not a conclusive fatalism, it is statutory warning. If you read it at the right time, you overcome it and survive to tell the story. If you don't, you are the story.