The Duality of Pain and Joy of Thinking
Students of life go about their routine living content in making decisions as they are asked, but many avoid superfluous decisions, or deciding when not asked. They live passively. Yet when you ask them to think, they find it painful and beautiful, nauseating and appetizing, taxing and awakening despite the opposing forces. The first force is inertia, the complacency with the sleeping drug of the doldrum routine that lulls them into a sense of duty to eternal recurrence; they wake up each day because it is what human beings do. The second force is philosophy, the love of wisdom, the taste of the divine experienced when discussing purpose, reason, the infinite, the absolute, the possibilities. You can see it in their faces after a philosophical dialogue—a cross between a pain, fatigue, resistance, and an awakening, recognition of dissonance, and desire to continue the effort. Like when you begin to sort out the pieces to a beautiful but complex puzzle, grasping the ambition of the great work before you, but appreciating the beauty of the process and the possibility.
Do the students recognize in themselves this tension? Do they see the beauty and the pain together and acknowledge they are a packaged deal? Why do they often return to the safety of their routine and unexamined living, so easily forgetting their moment of blissful enlightenment?