Name: The Superpower We Gain From Suffering
Uploaded: 2025-06-17T17:40:11.000Z
Duration: 2 min 57 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

There's an apparent paradox in the way that the longer we've lived, the more appreciation we tend to develop for very small and rather undramatic things.

Adverbs of degree

A moment in the kitchen with a square of dark chocolate, a walk to work, the first shoots in the garden in January, a weekend with no obligations, a very hot bath, conspiratorial laughter with a friend, a new book.

Transition words & phrases

These things matter more rather than less, even as our experience of the outer world and its people and places keeps increasing.

Relentless appetites for scale and outward excitement.

We want to bestride the world, leave a mark and meet soulmates.

We get bored in minutes in the most majestic settings.

We take the greatest mysteries in our stride.

We seldom stop by the side of the road to think or look.

But at some point, the direction of ambition reverses and what tends to initiate the change is pain.

The more challenging existence as a whole becomes, the more we get to know about love, sickness, infighting, intransigence, career reversal and political turmoil, the more we may appreciate what remains pure and despite its modest appearance or lack of obvious glamour.

Our respect for a fig, a moment of calm and a kind but unexciting friend is underpinned by memories of nights of crying, months lost to argument and instances of untrammeled despair in the bathroom in the darkness.

It is difficulty that catalyzes our interest in and respect for gardening or a painting of a lake in autumn, the life cycles of ducks or an article on the moons of Jupiter.

It is people who have known far more than they ever wanted about dementia, cancer, employment law, divorce and mental institutions who are the great appreciators of blossom, empty days, train journeys and the moon above the house on warm evenings.

To a five-year-old, it is just another ice cream and another sunny day.

To the grandparents sitting with them, everything is close to supernatural, the tiny fingers, the small plump body, their child who is now a parent loading up the car, the sound of a house finch somewhere in a tree.

The child, if they are fortunate, has no sense of the fragility of everything and of the cruelty waiting in the wings.

Who can properly delight in another scoop of vanilla and melted chocolate until they have, at best, three summers left?

The simple wonders of the world are constantly being rediscovered.

Those at the vanguard of doing so are those who first had to walk the corridors of hell.