Nothing comes to pass without trying.

Dukkha, a Sanskrit word translated as suffering in Buddhism. However, its original meaning refers to limitations that humans cannot control. A heavy rainfall that makes the sky look like a hole in the ground can also be considered Dukkha. What we do can be good or bad. If you open a large restaurant after retirement and the corona pandemic comes, it is beyond your control.

Dukkaha!

I need to make choices when the circumstances surrounding me don’t necessarily go my way. If you break up with a relationship, it hurts to a certain extent and you have to look for a new relationship, but if you keep clinging to a relationship that is far away, it is a disease. In the same way, even though the circumstances surrounding me are not in my favor, how I treat them is entirely up to me.

Victor Frankl was a Jewish psychiatrist who realized this during World War II when he was forced to spend time in the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp, under extreme conditions where he knew he could die at any moment. He realized that no matter how beaten, starved, and sick you were, it was up to you to decide what to make of it. It’s a human being who can go through forced labor and still be happy to see a flower on the side of the road. You have to accept the unavoidable circumstances that happen to you, and then you will have the strength to shake them off and overcome them.

I don’t know if it’s my parents’ influence or the self-help books I’ve been reading since I was young, but I tend to look for the positive in everything that happens. It is said that repetition becomes a habit and habits become second nature, but it is considered a good character trait anyway. But how can there not be difficulties and difficulties? Everyone’s conditions are different, so there is no reason to have a difficulty battle with each other, but this idea popped into my head at dawn today, or rather, it just popped into my head.

Do things have a predetermined ending? Maybe they do. But I don’t know the end of it. What I do know is that nothing comes to pass without trying.

Perhaps this should be the principle by which I live in the midst of Dukkha, or the many acting conditions that surround me. So if I want to do something, let me try. Will it work, I don’t know. But I do know that when I’m in doubt, I’m less likely to regret it later if I choose to do it.