“If it doesn’t challenge you, it won’t change you.” – Fred DeVito
This quote is from Fred DeVito, who along with his wife Elizabeth Halfpapp, are the creators of Core Fusion and the heads of the now global EXHALE spas.
You may examine the lives of the best and most successful individuals among us, and ask yourself whether a tree, if it is to grow nobly into the sky, can do without bad weather and storms. You may find that life without unkindness and external opposition, devoid of any challenge or adversity, would lack the favoring circumstances which cultivate our productive virtues and self-actualization. Like exposure to a poison which destroys the weaker nature in us and strengthens the stronger, adversity benefits us the same – but we would not call it poison, either.
It is with challenge and adversity that we grow stronger for ourselves and for those for whom we care most deeply. Learning any new skill is, in effect, undertaking a challenge. Upon completion, our reward is the combination of our newly integrated knowledge and the application of that newfound understanding which allows us to take on greater challenges and so on and so forth. This is how we evolve. Without challenge, we remain stagnant and incapable of productive, positive change.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, infamous 19th century Russian novelist, commented on the notion of a utopian world without challenge in his 1864 Notes from Underground. He believed that the early egalitarian, communitarian, and utopian thinkers of the time completely misunderstood the nature of human beings. “Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic prosperity, such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with the continuation of his species, and even then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element.” That is to say, in providing individuals with every want without struggle or challenge or the necessity of change – utopia – we would just as soon propel ourselves into action just to see anything happen. Life without challenge would be boring!
Herein lies a fundamental notion of human existence: we are by nature mercurial, brilliantly ever-changing creatures. To remain stagnant is to deny our own nature. So to those individuals who wish to improve themselves for the better, embrace life’s suffering, desolation, ill-treatment, and indignities – become familiar with profound self-contempt and the torture of self-mistrust. Face the interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness of others with positivity because every challenge you meet is an opportunity to grow and improve. It is only the ability to endure today that can prove whether one is worth anything tomorrow.
See you on the road of challenges!
Lisa
LMA Newsletter of 6-14-21
