On Suffering

A quote from Thich Nhat Hanh's True Love: A Practice for Awakening the Heart, which I enjoyed reading last week, and quotes from which now fill multiple pages of my journal.
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"If a person has never suffered, he or she will never be able to know happiness. If a person does not know what hunger is, he or she will never know the joy of eating everyday. Thus pain and suffering are a necessary condition of our understanding of our happiness. So do not say that you do not want to know anything about pain and suffering, that you only want to know about happiness--that would be an impossible thing. We know well that suffering helps us to understand, that it nurtures our compassion, and that for this reason it is vitally necessary for us. So we must know how to learn from suffering, we must know how to make use of it to gather the energy of compassion, of love, of understanding."
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yes, I agree, suffering has much to teach us about life. and joy is best understood if one also knows the nature of pain. BUT, how I wish the suffering of the world was distributed more equitably...