Thinking a lot about struggle these days. About the many ways we fight, strive and struggle for values, food, or life.
Often the most valuable moment for folks I work with is at the end of a class, when they get to lie down and surrender the fight for a moment, and just be.
In my own practices the struggle is a tool, a medium to go somewhere, to learn to surrender the fear or fight.
In patriarchal capitalist societies struggle is a necessary feat of survival. Struggling leads to hustling.
But, in Chinua Achebe’s words, here is the thing with struggling:
“No one is going to guarantee us the outcome. Nobody's going to say if you struggle, you will succeed. It would be too simple. But even if we are not sure how it is going to end, what success will attend our enterprise, we still have this obligation to struggle.”
Then struggle becomes a moral imperative, and a path to integrity, a journey in and out of hope.
So we keep going, even when there is no hope. Because the struggle itself is what sets us free sometimes.