Stay Grateful, My Friends

Last week I pointed you toward Sam Robinson’s excellent essay on runners’ obsession with the pain cave. It pairs well with this Jack Kornfield interview, in which the Buddhist teacher says that learning to embrace suffering is essential to living a meaningful life. Just as Robinson wrote that “my sense is that runners gravitate toward painful activities because they provide us with opportunities for knowledge,” Kornfield says that suffering can cultivate gratitude, which “helps us to become more mindful of the life around us and what circumstance we’re in.”

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