Suicide, Success and Nature Finding Balance

Living in a city where suicide happens on a fairly regular basis, one can't help but think about it. Particularly at those times when it stops the trains and makes you late for work. As such, I thought I'd take a minute to share my thoughts about it.

The funny thing about life is that in order to truly know happiness, we must also have a taste of sadness too. In order to truly enjoy the great highs it has to offer, for one reason or another, we always have to fight our way through the great lows in the process- sometimes with little more than faith to guide us on our way.
Personally, I think it stems from the 'tao' of all things and the dualistic nature of the universe that we live in. Facing sadness on the way to happiness, and failure on the way to success is simply how nature finds it's own sense of balance. It is the overcoming of failure and sadness, afterall, that gives us the strength to maintain and manage success and the happiness that comes from not taking that success for granted. I think all of us have met the rich kid who was born with everything, but remains miserable, or heard about the lottery winners who splurge their money in a year's time, or seen the one-hit-wonders who succeed in no time, but then go out just as quickly.
On the opposite side of the coin however, there are the stories of how Britney Spears failed on Star-Search, Bill Gates hospitalized himself multiple times building Microsoft or how Colonel Sanders proposed his fried chicken recipe to over 100 people before someone finally decided to invest in KFC.
As dissimilar as all of these events may seem, ultimately, they are all manifestations of the same process. - nature finding balance. And I think it is those who know that- and are guided by it- are the ones who really truly get somewhere in life.

The unfortunate thing however, is the potential for success that the hardships of life can give us do not always come to fruition. Oftentimes, we give up along the way, and all those battles that we fought, don't become our training ground- they become our reason for depression. They become our reason to hate life, and among those unfortunate souls who never pull themselves out of it- they become a reason to end it. Either they don't know, or they loose sight of the fact that the hell that they are suffering through- despite how awful it may be- is their greatest asset. They don't know that life, God, the 'Tao” or whatever else you want to call it- has deemed them worthy of a test- the ultimate test, really – the test of pure faith. And they don't know that most of the people who have achieved the greatest levels of success in society, have done so because they fought their way through it. As unknown as they may be, the aforementioned stories of Bill Gates, Colonel Sanders or Britney Spears are not exceptions-they are the rule. In searching for ways that I can succeed myself, I've found that in studying the lives of any person who achieves great success, similar battles (or tests) can be found- the fact that Mary J. Blidge used to be a teenage prostitute or that Michael Jordan missed the highest number of baskets in the history of the NBA, being but a few examples.

Perhaps, at least in the states, that is the media's fault for deifying these people and their success instead of showing them for the real people that they are, who fought the real battles that they did. Perhaps, it is the fault of the society that we live in, where children aren't being raised with the mental (or in many cases, even familial) support structure to handle these battles. Perhaps, as suicide doesn't seem to limit itself to any particular race, creed, or social class, is simply a naturally occurring facet of the human existence itself. Regardless of it's reason however, one thing is certain, the tragedy of it not only lies in the loss of a human life, but in the loss of a potential warrior to inspire the rest of us.

Recommended Readings on Taoism, and nature's balance:
The Tao of Pooh and The Te of Piglet by Benjamin Hoff
The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra