To those human human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities-I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them because i wish for them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not-that one endures.
-Nietzsche, The Will to Power.
There is something in feeling alive when you are dying. The will to live, an idea that rarely had crossed your mind comes into play and finds itself into your thoughts. The concerns that have been plaguing you, business, relationships, projects, leave to make room for the greater questions to be answered. Will I make it, what is going on with my time, am i on the wrong path and what direction are you headed. You enter into a more frantic and fearful state. Time starts to bend, where moments and days twist together with consciousness grasping at what to take in.
Like the mind, there is little you can do to change course. An infection, a valve, a calamity has taken route, the fight and its outcome seem predetermined. But still the will to win takes over, but the reality of it all shows up when you look at your face each morning, colors and sunken eyes tell all when you question who won the nightly or hourly brawl.
The hard times, the troubled moments and the darkest hours are when you can see things for what they are. Your friends, your foes, your family, become clearly arranged – falling into an order of care and importance that before you took for granted. Your physical energy, another thing you rarely took into account, takes over and your body either heals you or gives up. Everything you have done leads up to these moments, a riddled body whose defences are low will be taken by a common flu while a healthy ox can enter a coma and come out strong.
After these brushes with unfortunate times, you most likely will emerge a beaten but wiser soul. Someone who sees the world for what it is-awakes and is given a brief chance to see the world in new eyes. To, “become who you are” Neitzsche said and let pass all the mask and moments that were weighing you down before. To endure, the common theme that links all of us in both plants and animals, bacteria and viruses and everything and anything that is coming and has gone.