Call it misery, “the suck”, or what every you want. We have all been in a spot of perceived misery. I bet you came out the other side better for it, I know I have. You gain perspective, you get to reset the your current perspective of what you thought was misery or suffering to “that just sucked”. I am not talking suffering, like what we perceive an animal to be doing after getting hit by a car or the long struggle of a terminal cancer patient. I am talking getting to your perceived physical and mental limits and push them a little further. We all think we are at our limits, but rarely are we actually there.
I am not sure exactly what it was about share misery, but I enjoyed the end result. I enjoyed sharing the misery with my fellow crew members. I enjoyed “the suck” when I could ensure someone else on the crew did not have to be miserable if I could do it for them. It was after misery that I enjoyed it, and it was not the misery that I enjoyed, it was the feeling of “I made it”.
Most of my crew mates thought I absolutely enjoyed misery. Maybe I did, but I think I embraced “the suck” because I thought everything after that would be easier. If you start with something physically and mentally challenging first, then the easy stuff happens effortlessly. You then build a tolerance to the suffering, you reset what was miserable to “that was not to bad”. Better yet said the the words of Jame’s Evans after a shift of “cold trailing” through the tussock bogs of interior Alaska in his Nick’s without socks, “that went surprising well”.
I heard Lance Honda once say, build crew cohesion through shared suffering. Given that there is some level of misery that I enjoyed, it was when someone else was miserable. Call me a bad person if you want, but hear me out. When you share some miserable experience with others and see them struggle a little, it lets you know you are not alone. This is why seeing someone else show signs of misery made me realize this is not that bad. I remember those hikes when your thinking “when is this going to end”, “my legs are shot”, you see what you think is the ridge but it was really a false summit. If I could look up and see someone showing some struggling it would put a pep in my step. I use to joke with my fellow crew members that I was stealing their energy. Maybe there is truth to steeling energy, or maybe it is you just knowing your not alone. With age I learned to use that energy for good, to help them believe they were not miserable and they are not alone.
The best part of shared suffering, is the stories and the memories. I do not really remember the easy assignments. I remember the mentally and physically taxing assignments. Rarely do I reminisce at a social gathering with former crew members about the nice hotel or the cushy prepo assignment. We talk about the most miserable times we had together. We laugh, joke, and smile about said times. It reminds you of what you can do and what you have done.
My last year on the crew I really enjoyed watching people grow in their perspective of suffering. Watching them slog through something, seeing the look in their eyes of “wondering when it will be over”, cheering them on, telling them this is not your limit. To see that look of pride and joy when it was over, to hear them spin yarn with there cremates of misery of the past made me smile. The reality was I felt I had helped them learn a little more about themselves, that their perceived limits probably are not their real limits.
So it is true in some sense, misery can bring happiness. But you have to use it to reset your perspective and give contrast to what is joy vs misery. I think our current society in general has lost perspective of what misery and suffering is. You have to start somewhere, push that perceived misery off so that you understand what you did was just hard, not miserable. It is hard to enjoy the sun when you have no darkness. Think about those mornings you have woke up cold and damp coyoted or in a remote spike camp, how good did it feel when the sun finally hit you?