← The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show
The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show
The Hierarchy of Suffering: How to Carry What Feels Impossible | Ep. 68
00:54:01
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David Rutherford
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David Rutherford
If.
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David Rutherford
The overwhelming face of catastrophe, loss, heartache, betrayal, suffering and pain. The thing that we need to understand most is how to create an appropriate hierarchy of suffering. This week on the David Rutherford Show.
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David Rutherford
Over the past month I have been in a really different space, especially after the incredible experience of, of going on Sean show, offloading all of this pain from my past in a way that I had hoped would a benefit for others. And that was my intent, is that I would tell these stories to all of you and you would hear these the constant reality of the highs and lows of life and the fact that if you continue to press on with the right group of people, the right faith, the right framework, the right foundation of support and, and your own kind of belief systems that, that you can climb out of that abyss and get back up on, on the proverbial bike of life. And I was going great for a few weeks and then about four weeks or so ago began this cascade of suffering that seemed to be omnipresent at every turn or trip or person or people I was around or integrating with. It just seem kind of come out of nowhere and as if almost to test me to say all right, was all the things that you talked about, do you truly believe in them? Because now I'm going to give you and I mean when I speak in that context, I'm talking about God. I'm going to give you something to think about on a regular basis now. And this is the idea of suffering. And so as I was at a, a a a very good close personal friend of recently gotten divorced over a long, long difficult road of, of the relationship and, and the divorce itself and watched his suffering there and was supported it. He met somebody wonderful, fell in love immediately. Same background all this. So they came together and they're having this beautiful wedding up in the Adirondacks and man it was just like riding this high. I was there with one of my other closest friends and his beautiful wife, Dan Luna and Leslie Luna. And man we had these beautiful long discussions about what we've learned in our lives and how we're processing it. And just listening to him and his wife describe this really unbelievably difficult road of suffering they endured with Dan's mother over the two and a half years that she contracted cancer and, and, and they did everything in their powers to extend her which I I 100% and as do they extended their mom's life in ways I can't even begin to describe it. They you know, if you ever get an opportunity to hear him speak or listen to how he talks about life and death and, and what it represents. I think in. Out of all of my friends that have come out of, emerged out of the gwad in this very, very intense culture of death, Dan has one of the most profound ways to analyze this. And so here he is sharing this wonderful analysis of his own suffering, of his mother's suffering. And this is on top of his 20 plus years of service, nine combat deployments, and all of his closest friends who he had to present at their funerals, how it impacted his children growing up, right, to watch their uncles constantly dying on the battlefield, suffering catastrophic challenges in their post operator life with operator syndrome. And he's just sharing these really beautiful lessons he's learned. But at the same time, you know, I'm thinking to myself, how is these two people who are probably some of the hardest human beings I've ever met in my life, how do they just carry on day in and day out? What is the thing or the things or the ideas or the system or whatever it is that keeps them carrying on? And so we're all together celebrating our other friend's beautiful wedding. And in the midst of this wedding, I find out that a good, another good, close personal friend of mine, a guy who lived with me for many, many years, who just is an amazing human being. His name is Chris Morton. We went to high school together. He was the greatest athlete, natural, raw athlete, I've ever seen. We split ways after high school. He went to uva, played lacross. You know, just after that, he joined army, was an army, suffered some pretty substantial losses within his immediate family. Kind of sent him down a, a bad path and ended up getting sober. And we reconnected. When I got out of the agency and moved back to Florida, we ended up becoming close friends. He actually moved in with me when I was going through my divorce and was there for me and my children. He would come to, you know, Christmases, Thanksgivings, he would be around at Easter, you know, just all this incredible time and space together and our growth as, as human beings in our difficult times of suffering. And then when I met my wife, Jono, you know, he was like, hey, I'm gonna move out. I don't want to. I don't think you want a roommate, and you'll have four kids now, so I'm definitely out of here. And he did. And not long after that, he kind of fell off the, the, the sobriety train. And then battled significantly for the last five years until recently. He ended up succumbing to that suffering himself. So in the midst of this grand event of a wedding, and then in the next moment, recognition that. And I was there with other friends of his, one in particular, an unbelievable friend of mine, Jan Lennon, one of my closest friends there is, who's gone through his own suffering with the loss, an intimate family member in his life. And, you know, so we were in this. Meant we had to this beautiful. I was surrounded by people who were very adept, adroit, and sincere about how they've assessed and evaluated their own sufferings in their past. And so it was. There was a warmth there. But then I left, and, you know, it was like, whoa, that was heavy. That was a weekend to really think about the magnitude of what's taking place. And this was only a couple. Couple weeks after Charlie Kirk's assassination, to which an immeasurable amount of suffering just gripped the world and in particular, our country and the conservative movement and how people have been dealing with that suffering. Right. Right after that, a few weeks later, I reconnected and, you know, keep in regular touch with another friend of mine who has been embroidered in this custody battle case for over seven years just to see his child. And he's ingraded in a city in a system that does not give the benefit of the doubt or even support the male in these situations. And then the system itself has turned against him, used against him by his ex in a way that is the most malicious, depraved way I've ever seen in my entire existence. Just once again, proving the point that I believe that the judicial system, the justice system, is broken in so many different ways. The fact that this American hero, this person who has dedicated a massive portion of his life serving, he played Division one football, he now works for a fire department, and, you know, he has chosen service. But this vindictive woman who he was gracious to marry and have a child with, has turned him, the whole system, against him because she does not want him to have access to his child, because she knows the child will pick him because of how good of a father. And then I look at his life. He didn't even have a father growing up, right? So an entire life of not only his suffering, being raised without a father, but he had a great mom, great grandma, sister, you know, but also this lifetime of suffering within the military and that system, and now another eight years of suffering because all he wants to do is see and be with his child. I wonder how he's managing this now. He's one of the most spartan like human beings I've ever met in my entire life. He's just born from a different age. Almost as if there's a different sense of, of imprinting neurologically that he has somewhere in his genetic makeup there's some, you know, Spartan or some samurai cell that's ingrained in his psychology that enables him to endure things that would have bro at me 10 times over. So how does he endure that suffering? And just in the past couple weeks I was riding around some with some friends and doing my job and a bunch of, of of them have, have been caught up in, in something that seems a set of rules and regulations that seem whimsical and yet they are somehow being implemented in a way that my friends are going to result and suffer from. Financially, business a little bit potentially, but more so emotionally as to why are they singled out versus other people within the industry and watching them deal with that, how are they going to affect, is it going to affect their business, their long term employment? You know, all of those uncertainties that come with, with these types of oversight groups that seem to wield a power that doesn't often seem fair and just challenge. Chatting with them and listening to the advice they're getting from their friends and colleagues, you know, I just, it's interesting to watch how they're processing that type of suffering. And then finally this past week I had a wonderful experience. I was traveling with another guy up in the Midwest. And this is a man who a few years ago lost one of his young children in the middle of the night, unexplainably just died in his sleep. And we had about a two hour car ride together. And thankfully he's an unbelievably gracious and, and faithful man. That, that humors me. Maybe humor is not the word that, that is available for my, my questions, my curiosities, my sympathies. To try and understand how he sees the world through this very, very intense lens of suffering. How he wakes up every day, how he thinks about his child 30 to 40 times a day. How everything he does, everywhere they go, every time he passes by the child's room, every time he sees a piece of clothing, every time he goes to one of his other children's games, Every time he hears a particular song or sees a book he used to read him, every time he looks into his wife's eyes with that empty blank stare of he's never coming back, is he? And I listened to the strength in him. And I listened to him quote scripture 1 right after the other. And he had made a comment to me. He said that that joy and suffering are braided together at the deepest aspects of our psyches. They're conjoined. And this really kind of put me into a state of perplexity because how can those two things coexist in the same moment? And he went on to describe a very intimate description of Christ and Christ's relationship with his suffering for him, for my friend. And I'll explain that here as I come back around to this.
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David Rutherford
Lenovo and so I really that these things were this, this monstrous catalyst for me to just start going, well how does this work? Like where are we supposed to find the appropriate matrix, the appropriate venn Zen Venn diagram to figure out these hierarchies? Where does it begin? How do we assess it? Who's the in charge of the hierarchies and where do they come from? How do we scan the society around us and say okay, this is more weighted than this and this is more important to this. I mean in the last few weeks, what have we also seen? We've seen, thank God, hopefully a peace come to the Israel Palestinian thing or Hamas thing, right? Although today I just saw that they're saying that Hamas is breaking the ceasefire immediately. But what I did see is I saw a catastrophe of October 7th and I saw a catastrophe of many civilians, including children that were, were killed in the crossfires of this war. And that's who takes the most suffering is the people. Not the governments or the terrorist organizations, but the people that are encapsulated into this. So they are the reluctant sufferers that have no choice as to try and manage this, where do they seek, where do they seek the answers for their to adequately create this framework that they can dutifully or they can rationally or they can with reason come to a framework that doesn't destroy them. Where do we go? You know, the buildup of upcoming aggression in Ukraine. We have Trump basically saying, you know what? I'm thinking about supplying some long range missiles. And then you had the president of, of, of you, of Russia coming back. Let's say that's a total escalation. That means we're at war with NATO. Right? Where does that go? Well, as Jordy and I were talking about before we hopped on nuclear annihilation, think about the suffering in that. In fact, it's too difficult to come up with a description. Maybe perhaps go check out Annie Jacobson's book about nuclear war. And it has some pretty intense descriptions in there. The annihilation of existence itself, that's probably a pretty substantial amount of suffering. We've got a buildup of aggression around Venezuela, 10,000 troops running, B52 bombers offshore. We're doing kinetic strikes against boats in the Gulf. And don't get me wrong, I'm all for bringing it to the people who are trying to poison our children, poison each other in America. They get what they deserve. I have no love, loss for these people who want to continue to poison us for the benefit of their own, their own financial gains and all of the people down in the leaders down in those areas in those countries that are producing this poison. Guess what, man, it's fair game. If you want to poison us, then we're going to kill you. That's the way it should be. I mean, and if you want to think about that, I want you to think about the suffering of the over 500,000 people that have overdose dosed on fentanyl in the last five years. That's more than all the people we lost in World War II. Think about their families. Think about those mothers. Think about those brothers and sisters of their sons and daughters and aunts and uncles and mothers and fathers that are dead because of this poison that has flooded into our country. Think about the statements as a result of us punching back now and shutting the border down and going after these cartels and these criminal organizations. They, the cartels this past week basically came out and said, well, we're going to put bounties on the heads of border patrol or ICE agents, much less all the people that are antifa, people that are Violently protesting that are talking about violence as a necessity to overrule the king that has now taken over America, meaning Trump. Think about the suffering that's going to result from that and already is. Now, I know what people are saying, well, what about the suffering of those who are, yes, here illegally, but doing it the right way? That seems to be the new thing. And I said, you know what? I appreciate it. Send them back, get in line and come back through. We've got to change radically change the system to start from fresh. Otherwise the system will destroy us. Just look at the deficits that are being run in major cities where all these illegals are living in the school systems, in the hospitals, right? You seem to think that that little Bobby Joe who now is in, indicted in a classroom that's filled with 80% foreigners who don't speak English. What about his suffering in the development of his educational learning? Or what about the suffering of the people who go into a hospital, who have insurance, who can't get in because the ER is booked, because of all the illegal immigrants who use the ER systems as their form of health care, and then you have to fit the bill out of your taxes suffering. What I'm afraid is, is. And, you know, maybe this is because, I don't know, I'm, I'm, I'm digging more into the history of World War I and World War II lately. Or maybe it's because I'm trying to understand the impacts of suffering from the gwad on all of my friends and colleagues and, and buddies. Maybe it's just me. And trying to understand the suffering of my four teenage daughters. Maybe that's what it is. And the social hierarchies that change with the wind as it blows in a new direction every single day, or the suffering from the children I see that are phenomenally insecure, including some of my own. How do I bring forth a hierarchy or understanding of a hierarchy that gives them the talent, the skill sets, the hopefulness, the optimism that allows them to manage the sheer spectrum of what these hierarchies of suffering encapsulate. Now, after thinking about all these things, this idea popped in my head. And it's no new idea. It's just, it kind of hit me as typically a lot of these ideas of when I do these individual shows, and I hope you like them, I really hope you like them, I hope you enjoy the show, I hope you appreciate what it is because they're designed for these more difficult ideas or questions that we're often thinking about. But don't necessarily have an access point to deciphering them or deconstructing. Now, before I get into this detailed understanding or my interpretation of that hierarchy of suffering, I just want to take a quick moment to really tell you about one of our core sponsors. We couldn't be more grateful for the fact that Patriot Mobile has wanted to partner with us. We're so happy. We love the organization. So every so often something happens that reminds us just how fragile our freedoms are. Are we can't afford to take our rights for granted. We must draw a line in the sand. And Patriot Mobile has been doing just this for more than 12 years. 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David Rutherford
So when I was thinking about this whole idea, this hit me like a ton of bricks. The construct of suffering itself doesn't maintain the wall if the individual can restructure their perception of willpower in order to break down the impact of the suffering against their defenses. And so that's essentially the easiest way for me to kind of evaluate because one of the things that I did when I was with Dan Luna is we talked extensively about the compartmentalization of it. How is it that going through training, going back overseas over and over and over, how is it that we're able. And I'm not saying the way with which we compartmentalize is healthy, but what you can say is it enables us to continue mission to Charlie Mike.
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David Rutherford
And it's interesting that one friend of mine who's in the the horrific custody battle, you know, when he got. Went back to Penn State and spoke after the Joe Paterno fiasco, I shouldn't pin it on him. It wasn't him as another coach, but he participated in covering up to a certain extent, I would imagine. And the suffering that emerged. They asked my friend to go talk to the team during that time, and he gave this very powerful spe and it was called Charlie Mike. Continue mission. So regardless of whatever you're facing, whatever level in the hierarchical food chain you're going through, there's a whole other side of you that, guess what, you have to just keep going. In particular, if you've got your own responsibilities, if you've got a family to take care of, if you have a wife to take care of or a husband to take care of, you've got beautiful children or you've got elderly parents to take over, take care of, you have a business to run, run. It's like, tough. Guess what? Drive on airborne. Because regardless of your suffering and the level of your something, you've got to continue to, to produce, to perform in order to maintain that momentum forward for all those who are dependent upon you. So Dan and I were like, well, how does this happen? What does it do? How do you understand? And he said, first and foremost, man, you got to understand what, where the compartmentalization emerges from. How are hierarchies incorporated into our existence as it is? And, and really, how do we define suffering itself? And so obviously, when you hear a man of, of that caliber of intelligence and, and the level with which he understands these complicated problems, you do a little research. And so just to start out, just to reset this conversation in this moment moment, I want to talk about the definition of hierarchy. Hierarchy refers to a system or structure in which individuals, groups, or elements are organized in a ranked order based on authority, importance, status, or some other criterion. It implies a vertical arrangement where higher levels hold greater power, influence, or priority over lower ones ones. Hierarchies are prevalent in social, organizational, political, and philosophical context, often shaping how resources, responsibilities, or values such as suffering are distributed or perceived. Definition of suffering. Suffering is the experience of pain, distress or hardship, often involving physical, emotional or mental anguish. It can arise from various sources, such as physical injury, illness, loss, fear, or unfulfilled desires. And it is typically characterized by a sense of discomfort or dissatisfaction. Philosophically, suffering is often seen as an inherent part of human existence through its nature and purpose, though its nature and purpose are interpreted differently across cultures and belief systems. And that's a kicker right There, for example, Buddhism views suffering, duka or whatever, D u k k h a duka as a fundamental aspect of life due to attachment and impermanence, while other perspectives might frame it as a response to adversity or a catalyst for personal growth. All right, now, you know, as you begin to, to, to, you know, dissect the, the different levels with which you can understand the value, context of suffering.
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Nyx Leak Proof Underwear Advertiser
Right.
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David Rutherford
You have to spread it out across something that you fully understand. And so for me, my whole system of how I approach life and how I approach relationships and how I approach myself, and also what I've built my business around is the idea of these frog logic concepts, right. You know, and that's learning to embrace fear, forge self confidence, live a team life and live with purpose. The whole fundamental strategy of that is to deal with suffering. Right. It's my system that made sense to me. It's a way I can give a rank order or, or, or a definitive pyramid system as to what I really need to focus on and what, and how it presents itself to me. Right, right. You know, and when you're dealing in the context of suffering, right. It's really about these more extended ideas in terms of our existential selves. Right. The collective suffering of our group or tribe. Right. And how we rank certain individuals in our tribe and their suffering as lower than ours or higher than ours. Right. And that's based on this visual interpretation of their anguish or suffering or pain, pain that we experience in those interactions. Right. But it's also, we rank it in our cultures which parts of our culture have more suffering than others. Right. Is it in particular in the current order we're in? It seems that, you know, certain aspects of American culture have been flipped upside down. And those external cultures that have weave their way in on the infected, on these other ideologies have basically said, all right, that our forefathers in America, my ancestors in the Appalachians, my Scottish ancestors, were somehow, they didn't experience suffering and that they were the ones that were responsible for suffering and that was some other groups, they had to deal with the suffering. And then all you got to do is just go a little bit further back in time and you see that those cultures, they impose suffering themselves. In fact, the reality of these hierarchies is kind of interesting. When you dig deep enough, you recognize that all cultures have the ability to impose and to experience suffering. All genders have the ability to impose or experience suffering. Right. Religions. Right. Whether you're an atheist or you're science based or whatever. We always have this, like it said, this innate ability to experience the suffering. Right. It's, it's imbued, so to speak. Speak now. One of the things I wanted to do is I really was like, all right, who's the world grand champion of understanding this? Who is the person that spent the most amount of time, that did the most amount of research, that did the most amount of thinking and came up with in my opinion, the, the greatest really thoughtful, considerate and brutal understanding of these hierarchies of science, suffering and that person, not according to me, but according to just about everybody else when I did the research on it, was Frederick Nietzsche. From 1844 to 1900, he extensively explored suffering's role in human existence, its varying forms and the implicit hierarchies and works like Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, on the Genealogy of Mortality and the Antichrist. Now his philosophy doesn't explicitly use the term hierarchy of suffering, but he deeply engages with how suffering is ranked by individuals, societies and moral systems based on its source, purpose and transformative potential. His focus on suffering, psychological, existential and cultural dimensions, combined with his critique of moral frameworks, example in particular Christianity, and he says it's a slave morality, makes his work foundational for analyzing hierarchies of pain. Nietzsche's influence on existentialism, postmodernism and psychology examples, Freud, Frankl, underscore his prominence in this deep dive into understanding suffering. Suffering, right. He goes on to really evaluate suffering's role in human greatness. He has a very extensive critique of moral hierarchies. He has an existential and psychological dimensions, right? Cultural and comparative suffering, which I, I find is the one that really is permeating in America right now, right? We're, we're so engaged in this tit for tat game of, of your culture hasn't suffered as much as my culture. Therefore I'm gonna make your culture suffer more to catch up, to make it right, to do whatever. And that's just being force fed to our young people. It's being force fed to our old people. I mean hell, you look at the no Kings rallies over the past weekend and what did you see? A bunch of middle aged white people in these cities going to town. And then who else? These crazy radical young progressive leftists who are supporting socialism or American socialism or Marx, whatever the hell you want to talk about it, as if that doesn't cause suffering. And so what they are trying to get you to believe is that your suffering, your existing suffering as well as the the hierarchy of your, your legacy, your, your heredity, your, your, your family tree and the suffering they experience does not rate in the same level as someone else, right? And you even see that overseas. You see people trying to contextualize suffering in a very prominent way through cultural backgrounds, religious backgrounds, who was here first, who wasn't here first. Therefore, I have a greater weight to apply to my own suffering. Suffering versus your suffering. And you'd actually deserve the suffering. So I'm going to give you a bigger dose of it. Because mine was so big. You deserve yours now. And that for me is kind of the, the unbelievable reality of that is like as I go through all of these things and I, you know, you start to think about who else did Nietzsche influence, right? And he influences Heidegger, Camus, Foucault, Po. Right? All of these people's ideas that have permeated where, right into these core ideals or, or systems of thinking and critical theory ideas or, or whatever you want to describe them as postmodernistic, morally relative ideas of suffering, which basically says, oh, you have made me suffer, now I'm going to make you suffer. And when that happens, it does not take anybody longer than an hour of just a superficial level of research to look at just the 20th century. Don't go back any far behind that. You can start right at about 1905, 1906. You can start right there and you can just go forward and you can start to think about, about the hierarchies of suffering from the 20th century, right? And what impacted from that. I was just listening to a historical podcast that was talking deeply about the trenches of World War I. And it was this beautiful introduction about how the men on all sides, not just Germany or France or England or wherever, but all sides of those who participated in those trenches and what they had to endure for years. Now it's like you, you were in the trench for six months like we do, and then you go home and you rotate out. No, this is years because the end is on the line for everybody, right? And so in that trench, you want to talk about suffering, you had many times, water up to your chest. What do you think that did after three or four days in your boots and in your crocs, flesh just falling off after it becomes rotted with the infections. Because when you're in up to your waist, what else do you have? You're urinating and defecating right there in the system. Plus you have the piled up courses right down at the end of your trench, right there just rotting Flesh. With hundreds if not thousands of rats eating that flesh and defecating in the water and the swarms of flies and the lice on your body. Body. And all of the fleas that were ingratiated into your beard and in your food as you ate it. Suffering. What do you think those boys, after they came out of that pit, decided that the next time there was suffering, there was going to be absolutely no quitting because of what suffering took place then? That's what we now know we're willing to do. Those are the edge. So what do we do? We reset. Came out of it okay, the Great War is over. We're done. And guess what? 1939, 38, 39. It starts all over again. This time, instead of what 24 million or whatever is. And by the way, you want to read some suffering about the combat itself, go read about the battle of the Somme. In the first day alone, the first day alone, the British took 60,000 casualties. These are young boys. These are a generation of people that are gone and never came back. And so that suffering integrated into the culture of that society, integrated into the legacy, into the DNA of those children who came out of that time to be predispos for a magnitude of suffering that seems to be catching up some steam again. Again. Because those children are now in power around the world or have been in power for the last 30 to 40 years. And so when you start to think about how this imprints across the board and all these different things and the way it structures itself, in my mind, it just keeps building and building and building and building until you're at the point where it's like, oh, you want to know? Suffering. Suffering. Well, my country just lost 22.5 million human beings. Oh, and then on the flip side of that, the people who governed my country just killed 65 million human beings. Murdered them, starved them to death, butchered them, ate their flesh to stay alive. Suffering.
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David Rutherford
Lenovo so as you begin to see these things and one of the things that I found, you know, kind of interesting about Nietzsche and you know, he did have the great quote that I kind of beaten to death in my time while I was serving as you know, that which does not kill you only makes you stronger. Yes, indeed. But what happens to the heart, the soul, when suffering becomes so integrated into the context of your being that all you exist in is as an interpretation of, of. Of your suffering or arranging your suffering on the hierarchy of. Of. Of what It's. It's not tolerance on the hierarchy of. Of. Of being able to sustain these other responsibilities of your life. You know, and the other one great comment that I think really was correlated to Nietzsche in such a profound way is that, that, you know, God is dead. And what he kind of assumes in these statements is that Christianity itself, because its core root principle of seek and ye shall receive the truth, essentially what happened as a result of that culture, that hierarchy of suffering that was integrated with Christ himself and his suffering and what you get for that suffering, it emerged and it stepped away from the core root idea and then became, well, let's figure out what the truth of existences. Is God real? And yeah, it's totally cool. Let's question God, let's question the family, let's question the difference between a man and a woman. Let's question capitalism, let's question everything so that everything is on the table to generate suffering. Well, what happens to a society, in particular its children, when they don't believe that there's any outlet or escape, there's any other component of their existence where they can't restructure these hierarchies, where they put something like their faith in Christ at the top of the hierarchy? What happens when they can't? They, they, they lose faith in their ability to provide for their future wife or their future family because they can't get a job coming out of these institutions that have robbed them of 100 or $400,000 in degrees that are meaningless in the grander context of the world. What happens to the children that you have robbed them of any resilience or grit because you have them facing their screens, keeping them insecure on whether or not they're pretty enough or they're smart enough or they're capable enough. What happens in a society that lives in that perpetual onslaught of trying to figure out, out what the hell is it worth? Where do I look? What moves up the chain and, and not, not usurps or bumps out, but what can I put next to the probability of my own death to balance that out, to give it a counterpoint? The yin and the yang, the good and the bad, evil and good, good Christ and Satan, whatever you want to match it as that. That's the context of the balance that I believe is required. And that's why I think, you know, people like Junior Tolkien really helped us begin to contemplate in this modern era. There are some other great writers and philosophers out there too. I don't want to go too in the weeds and maybe I'll do that as, you know, some of the most positive philosophers out there, certainly you've got concepts within positive psychology. You've got concepts of, you know, what's your why, Hell, you've even got David Goggins like, who's like, fuck you. Suffering is your joy, right? That braided integration and people respond to it. And so again, I come back to this necessity that we all have as individuals to try and figure out as these hierarchical hierarchies of suffering are so inundated, how do we put forth something into counterbalance, right? What is the thing that fortifies our defensive systems around this? And I'm not sure, I'm not sure, but I think what it is, is it starts by asking these questions of ourselves, right? Should we learn to rank our suffering, suffering in more of a sophisticated manner, right? So if, if, you know, I don't get something done for my kid on time, do I inundate myself with, with grief and guilt that I can't be there or I'm on the road always or, you know, or, or we can't afford it or whatever. How do, what do I do then? Is there a sophisticated way to have those discussions that keep your kids in check or keep, keep yourself in check? Is there a more sophisticated way to evaluate, right. Our. The way we analyze our abilities at work and performance? Jordy and I talk about it all the time. We talk about being patient and growing our audience. We talk about being patient and picking the right topics and talking with the right people. And it takes time to build something of any significance. Dickens, he's a constant reminder for me, hey, let's be patient, let's stay focused, let's do what we're doing. And I try and be that for him. So out of that idea of, of sophistication, I think what naturally should emerge for all of us, right, Are these coping mechanisms for this hierarchical, constantly moving structure of suffering. And what do those coping mechanisms look like best? In my mind, I go back to that wedding where after we found the horrible news, and I think about the conversations I was able to. Had with my wife in the moment, conversations I was able to have with her since then, the conversations I had when I went with Jan to the, to the beach and we went paddle boarding, because that's something the three of us used to do all together. And we sat in the water and I prayed in the water and Jan. And we had great memor of what he did and his soft heart and how much he loved us and how much he cared for us and our children and how difficult it was for him to show it. But he was there and there was an amazing steadfastness even into the chaos of his own suffering. So now you start to think, oh my God, maybe this, this, this, this, this, this structure is not as, as, as impenetrable as as it might otherwise seem. In particular, when you're under, you're under the, that rock, the Sisyphus rock of suffering, right? Like I'm never getting this damn thing off my shoulders. But you can share the weight. You can most certainly share the weight. And I think the, the real question should be initiated on whether or not we need more of what A greater innate sense of equilibrium, equilibrium within our framework of suffering to include empathy, right? Or a sense of, of what is it? It's a sense of calmness in recognition that sometimes suffering is outside of our control, right? It's this sense of acknowledging that maybe the person who lost their child, child, you know, that the weight of their suffering is unique to them. And then the suffering of a child who's struggling with the relationship with their parent, right? And that we shouldn't perhaps delineate too much, which one has more weight than the other. And in that calmness or that stillness or that, that state of, of peace that, that state that Christ talks about for us, right? That state where once you get, give up the sense of worry and you just trust in God's plan and you trust in God's presence and you trust in his suffering that He. He had the empathy to take the suffering of the entire world through all time on his shoulders and bear that burden in that nine hours when he was on the cross and the time he was being beaten and whipped the night when he was in the garden, and he, God was speaking to him, saying, are you ready? Because guess what? It's coming. And he was weeping blood and tears, sweating blood. Imagine the. The weight of that suffering. And he says, trust in me. I am the way. So think about how you can employ that reality into your life. And as you identify the people around you that are in these various levels of suffering, think to yourself, to them, you can be the way for them. Not by giving them some scripture, although scripture can help, but more so just give them the presence that you are empathetic to their suffering, that you maybe not understand the details of it or can have felt anything that's relative to the specificity of their suffering, but you're there and you understand it, and you want to listen, and you're there and you're like, hey, I got it. It's okay. You're going to be okay. Let's get through it together. And imagine if we could just do that with one or two people. People every month or two, or even one person for an extended period of time. And I know it's hard. I know it's real hard. I've had to insulate myself and my family from a lot of suffering, not only in my own heart and mind, but from my world. That culture of death that always seems to come knocking in the middle of the night. So in the midst of all that, just take a step back and say, all right, how can I help somebody who's suffering? Maybe it's just opening your heart to them. Maybe it's sending them a note, sending them a letter. Maybe it's taking them out to dinner. Maybe it's just calling them up and saying, hey, I love you. Because that's the thing that begins to make sense to me as I analyze the suffering and the extensiveness of. With it. It's just seems to be building and building and building. I think we get back to the place where we recognize that pain is a. A shared experience. In fact, I'm here to tell you that in the 30 years of me being an instructor, a coach, an operator, a speaker, you know, all the thinking things I've done, I can tell you this. The one thing that seems to make us unite and make us fight at the most is one, the collective understanding of each other's shared type of pain. And then it's the collective anger against each other's suffering. Basically, saying, you're making me suffer, so now you're going to suffer. And so these things coexist in this complex weave that. I think that's what my friend was talking about, this joy and suffer. I mean, that's, that's intermittent, angered. And perhaps that's what he was trying to tell me with. It comes to, with Christ himself. He knew he had to suffer to set me free. Maybe that's it for you and I. Maybe if we recognize that we have to suffer to set each other free, maybe that's the hierarchy, hierarchy we need to think about. I just want to thank all the people that I talked about in terms of their unbelievable influence in my life. In particular those who are not with us anymore and their families. I want to thank, I want to thank my family. I want to thank my wife, amazing human being who's helped me understand suffering more than anybody else I've ever met. You know, I want to thank you, Jordy, for giving me the support and the, just the, the confidence that maybe we're doing something right by getting on this microphone and sharing these thoughts with people and the, that hope that we can lift one person up in the show. That's what we hope we do. And then I want to just thank Christ for the suffering he went through so that I could feel the joy of having eternal life through his resurrection. I hope you all find a way this week to gain strength, to minimize your suffering and to find empathy for other people. God bless you. Ah, come on.
- [63:50]
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