Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle
Some make the argument that life, in a sense, is just one big fight. That is also one reason why so many are drawn and inspired to combat sports athletes; we see their struggles in the cage and ring, and it touches us inside as it reflects the hardships we have and continue to encounter in life.
One thing about mixed martial arts that people like to see is the show of respect that fighters have towards one another. The tapping of gloves before a fight and the class and reverence they show towards one another after the bout is something many enjoy watching. The fighters understand what their opponents have to go through and sacrifice to just get to the fight, and then go through to endure the fight. That allows them to have a sense of camaraderie, respect, and compassion for the other man or woman in the cage.
In everyday life we can adopt this philosophy of respect towards others, because in some way, we are all fighters. You can go back to a great quote from Rashad Evans on the concept of us all being fighters for greater understanding:
We all are fighters, every single person who walks this earth is a fighter, everything that lives. To live is to fight, and we just fight in just different arenas.
So we all fight in different arenas, in different ways, and all are having to deal with different things in our life. Suffering is a universal concept and while it can be immensely difficult to endure at times; but it is also something which breeds a beautiful emotion: compassion. Because we all suffer we can have a sense of kinship to other human beings and sentient beings as a whole. The great Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh speaks about how compassion is made out of non-compassion elements. Just as a flower requires mud to be able to flourish, in the same vein compassion requires the "mud" of suffering to be able to blossom forth. So since we are all fighting our own battles and suffering, we can look upon every single human being on the planet as someone we can connect with and be compassionate towards. No matter how perfect someone's life seems, there is suffering which creeps into our existence in a myriad of ways.
Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle
No comments:
Post a Comment