The psychology of struggle

Men enjoy manly struggles.

When men suffer it is humiliating. Suffering is the punishment served out by kings to force their subjects into subservience. When a man suffers he has failed. Yet suffering happens, it is humiliating but it is fact.

A psychology to cope with this is to actively take on struggles which require endurance. Thus a man may create suffering, and face it, but on his own terms. Journeying to the Pole we will struggle against the limits of endurance and brave many hardships and if successful we will return more than victorious over distance, but over suffering itself – raising a fist aloft and declaring in pride a victory over a World that sort to humiliate us in suffering. That suffering that at first humiliated us, now through endurance has become the source of our pride. But we have become cold not because we have beaten suffering, but because we have become so tough that we cannot feel anything anymore.

And yet despite our apparent victory we will return to discover new sufferings, unhappinesses and humiliations. For all men it is a fact that we will suffer, and we will be humiliated and there is no power within us to stop this. In Christianity our God himself was humiliated exactly like this, treated as a common criminal and died a hated man. When we feel humiliated it is worth remembering that God must have felt more humiliated than we can ever begin to imagine!