tycho wrote:Wakanyugi wrote:Here is one more spin (thank you teacher Muriel).
@Lolest has told us that greatness acquired the easy way is greater than that acquired the hard way.
Let me turn this around and oversimplify.
Somebody makes your life hard, you react by doing or becoming way more that you could ever have imagined.
On the other hand the fellow who never had it rough goes through life without realizing his/her true potential (unless he is like Nyerere).
Who should we be thanking?
Those who pave our life paths with rocks or with cabro?
The argument that we can tell how someone else's experience is hard or soft is probably false. How can we tell? By analogy? Like, 'it would be very hard for me to go to prison, y went to prison. Therefore, it was very hard for him'. I see defects with this kind of logic.
Tycho. It is all comparative but even then...Let us use the current cases.
Many people would agree that spending years on the run, going into exile, months on the dock facing possible death, 27 years in Robben Island etc that is tough.
This was Mandelas life path.
Nyerere encountered and overcame many challenges too. But compared to Mandela, his life path was a cakewalk.
Now let me personalize this a bit:
I have never been to jail or on death row. But I have faced my share of challenges and happy times, same as everyone else.
My point is: we grow more from the challenging moments (however defined) than from the easy ones. Yet I curse almost every person who ever made life hell in the past. Shouldn't I be thanking them instead?
"The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth." (Niels Bohr)