Fuel for our journey
“Fire O” by Marcus Obal, licensed under CCA-Share Alike 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
“We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey.” — Kenji Miyazawa
That sounds like a good idea to me. However, it may be difficult to implement. As fuels go, pain is an expensive one. And it’s not particularly clean-burning, either.
Still, there are times when we don’t have much choice. It may be that burning pain for fuel is the least damaging option in the long run, far less damaging than storing it away where it will produce toxic fumes. Besides which, we may not have a lot of other options available for some quick and much-needed energy.
During those times when we find ourselves running low on fuel, whether physically, emotionally or spiritually, I hope we can find ways to utilize the negative experiences of pain, sorrow or frustration, all of which tend to have lessons embedded within. If we’re lucky, we still have a good bit of our journey ahead of us, and we can use whatever assets we find to keep us going. Some will be more attractive than others, but all might turn out to be necessary.
I wish you freedom from pain, but when it strikes, burn it as fuel if you can possibly manage it. Though it’s a tough conversion process, it’s worked for me in the past, and probably will again.
One year ago today:
This post was first published seven years ago today. The original post, comments and photo are linked, along with two other related posts, below. These links to related posts, and their thumbnail photos, do not appear in the blog feed; they are only visible when viewing the individual posts by clicking on each one. I have no idea why, nor do I know how they choose the related posts. That’s just the way WordPress does things.
- Posted in: Uncategorized
- Tagged: grief, happiness, heartache, joy, pain, redemption, sorrow, suffering, understanding, wisdom
Defeat Despair 
