” Sometimes you must hurt in order to know, fail in order to grow, lose in order to gain because life’s greatest lessons are learned through pain.” – Pain (Nagato)

Hope and expectation are predicated on the fact that we have paid our due diligence today to secure the freedoms of tomorrow. “the light at the end of tunnel” is an ideology that if we go through darkness, the end result will always be light. A better tomorrow lays its foundation on the idea that today isn’t as we hoped, and if we go through the hassle of today, tomorrow for sure will be great and better; what a partial truth. There isn’t always light at the end of the tunnel; tomorrow isn’t always promised because today’s sacrifices were well made. Hope isn’t a strategy for survival or faith an instrument for battle. They both play their role; of delusion and transcendental submissiveness, placating the helplessness of the mortal being with the idea that something or someone higher than us will deliver us from our current plight and bring us to the desired tomorrow.

What then shall we do when hope and faith seem to fail or fail? What shall we do when the gods fail to attend to our needs, and we are left naked without help? What shall we do when the pain becomes our closest companion and the future is bleak? – what should we do when we are at the end of the tunnel yet gazing at the abyss of darkness.? I don’t know. Should we still rely on faith and hope or embrace our current friend and partner, pain? Is there anything worth learning from pain? Yes, there is. Pain teaches us peace and the value of peace. Peace is not the absence of trouble but its tolerance, peace in knowing that tomorrow may not be blissful as hoped but the assurance that whatever tomorrow brings, we can handle. Peace: not in hoping for a light at the end of the tunnel, but peace in being accustomed to darkness and confusion, knowing that to see through life, one doesn’t always need light, for one could be light themselves.

Pain is the crossroad between meaning and nihilism. Meaning in this sense that one may wish for a thousand miracles and get none, but in the lack of one’s desires, one begins to see that surviving lack is in itself a miracle. A blessing not prayed for but highly needed. Meaning; that going through the dark tunnel may not necessarily give light at the end but create in us the ability to navigate through the darkness.

Nihilism; when one becomes too afraid to face pain, one chooses a path without meaning; for the path to meaning is paved by pain and suffering. One meets a more distasteful fellow in one’s avoidance of pain: void, nothingness, emptiness. Then one recognizes that pain becomes “the half bread,” which is better than none.

Nihilism, in this sense, that all that is good becomes valueless and, to the extreme, values will be deemed as evil because why should the path to good be paved by stress, tears, agony, and even death. In nihilism, everything of real value is replaced with decadence; one seeks extreme pleasure, which leads to moral decline and the end of one soul.

“ To be strong is not to avoid pain, but to feel it, understand it and accept it.“