Ashley Elizabeth Miller

Don’t forget to stop and smell the roses.

My grandfather, Dr. Edgar R. Miller, engrained that lesson in my mind from the time I was ten — or at least, that’s when it began to stick. Another thing he used to say was, “Ashley, you’ve got your head on straight.” I always used to wonder what this meant, but having gone through loss, social isolation, and heartbreak (John Keats’ formula for educating a soul), I know now what ole’ Grandad meant.

In the words of Nietzsche, “I assess the power of will by how much resistance and pain it has endured.” The level of emotional turmoil is subjective to your position in life: where you were born, the type of family support you did (or did not) have, private or public education, or none at all — and the list goes on.

Hercules taught us to find strength in suffering. He rolled the boulder up the mountain despite knowing he would never reach the top. But the futility of said endeavor did not deter him. He would not lay back and take the punishment imposed by the Gods. He found strength in suffering. One can never truly be an insider, until he is forced to become an outsider.

Again, looking at Nietzsche, life is a never-ending power trip from encounter to encounter, person to person. Some will have more hurdles than others. And there are those who will never know the truth at all. They will never detect injustice in the world or feel empathy for others — how could they? They have never felt marginalized themselves. And this is why Nietzsche said: embrace pain.

“To those human beings who are of any concern to me, I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities.”