“You Don’t Have The Luxury Of Giving Up”

I remember reading ‘The Power of Others’ whilst I was in London towards the end of 2014, and there were a few things that I made a note of. In the chapter that I was reading at this time, the author touched upon how it is easier for someone to be curious when they are not caught up in trying to make ends meet and he spoke about something that Mark Beaumont had said.

This is someone who is a record breaking long-distance British cyclist, and the quote that is mentioned in this book must have been something that mark came about with when he was talking about this area of his life. Mark said, “You don’t have the luxury of giving up”, and this was something I resonated with.

No Choice

Mark could have been talking about how, when he was cycling, he just had to keep going. Throwing in the towel and just stopping wasn’t something that he could do, for whatever reason.

When I had heard this quote I was working through my own pain, and I giving up wasn’t an option that was on the table, so to speak. If I had taken my foot of the gas and just accepted how I felt, I wouldn’t have had a very fulfilling existence.

Up Or Down

If I wasn’t in such pain, I might have been able to simply tolerate what was going on and to carry on with my life. But, as I was in a very bad place emotionally, I couldn’t just put this part of me to one side and carry on as normal.

Now, I could have given up; it wasn’t as if someone was holding a gun to my head. However, a big part of me was aware of how far I had come, and, no matter how I felt, I had to keep going until I was able to transform myself.

A Common Theme

It is clear that it is due to this way of responding to difficult circumstances that certain people have been able to go from the bottom to the very top. Instead of allowing the pain they were in to define their life, they channelled it into making their life worth living.

When people hear about how someone like this is living their life, it can seem as though they got lucky, or that they had a good start to life. What they won’t be aware of is how someone like this will have used the pain of being at one end of the spectrum to propel them towards to other the end of it.

Final Thoughts

Taking this into account, it is easy to see how having a life that ‘isn’t too bad’ is not ideal if someone wants to live a life that is deeply fulfilling. And, this is also going to be the case if one area of their life is this way.

Other areas of their life might be going very well, but this area might not be too bad, thereby taking away their desire to do anything about it. What this shows is how important pain is when it comes to living a life that is worth living.