Perhaps some other thinkers and writers would agree that Nietzsche is someone who cannot be evaded no matter how hard one tries, given his unmatched and intuitive understanding of the human condition. As Nietzsche wrote:
“The discipline of suffering, of great suffering — do you not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far? That tension of the soul in unhappiness which cultivates its strength, its shudders face to face with great ruin, its inventiveness and courage in enduring, preserving, interpreting, and exploiting suffering, and whatever has been granted to it of profundity, secret, mask, spirit, cunning, greatness — was it not granted to it through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering?”
An evasion of Nietzsche and thus an evasion of authenticity, meaning, and truthful living is often carried out through bedazzled leaps at consumption or through endless diversions away from what is actually important and pertinent. All of it is quite exhausting. But as someone said, exhaustion is necessary for an appreciation of the joy which comes later.
Nevertheless, it is exhausting when one endures loss after loss on a personal level, and then twerps in America become big shots and superstars off the knowledge you share with them while you get no recognition whatsoever, or when a person gets snubbed by the one or two persons to whom you opened up and gave your heart. But with tragedy – and as mentioned before, life is a ‘tragicomedy’ – there arises a collective urge for a course correction. Whether the course correction actually takes place or not is not the main issue. Rather, the collective nature of the urge to actually make the course correction happen, along with the realization that you are not alone in having such an urge, is what makes the suffering and tragedies less painful.
As one BBC news article dated April 8, 2021 put it:
“‘Tragedy and Mobilisation’ imagines a world in the midst of a global catastrophe in the early 2030s thanks to climate change, famine and unrest – but this in turn leads to a new global coalition, driven in part by social movements, to address the problems.”
Perhaps the timetable for the mobilization is much more condensed than initially perceived by the American intelligence officials who made this assessment. The article ends with the suggestion that “a combination (of circumstances) or something entirely novel may emerge.” Another issue is that folks who are accustomed to comfort, predictability, and sinecure jobs and positions hate uncertainty. But as Paul Nitze famously said: “All is uncertainty.”
Perhaps no one would have imagined that, for instance, political instability could beset Westminster within the span of twenty-four hours. But abandoning luxury and predictability in order to “ride the wave” or to be taken away by the currents of a common cause shared with so many other oppressed people is a prospect that all of us should be open towards. As Rumi wrote in a poem titled “Come Back, My Friend”:
What was in that candle’s light
that opened and consumed me so quickly?
Come back, my friend.
The form of our love is not a created form.
Nothing can help me but that beauty.
There was a dawn I remember
when my soul heard something from your soul.
I drank water from your spring
and felt the current take me.
Adam A. Azim 