The 50th Law (with 50 Cent)

Embrace all pain and adversity.
Life by its nature involves pain and
suffering. And the ultimate form of this is death itself. In the face of
this reality, we humans have a simple choice: We can try to avoid
painful moments and to muffle their effect by distracting ourselves, by
taking drugs or engaging in addictive behavior. We can also restrict
what we do—if we don’t try too hard in our work, if we lower our
ambitions, we won’t expose ourselves to failure and ridicule. If we
break off relationships early on, we can elude any sharp, painful
moments from the separation.
At the root of this approach is the fear of death itself, which
establishes our elemental relationship to pain and adversity, and
avoidance becomes our pattern. When bad things happen, our natural
reaction is to complain about what life is bringing us, or what others
are not doing for us, and to retreat even further from challenging
situations. The negative paradoxical death effect takes hold.
The other choice available to us is to commit ourselves to what
Friedrich Nietzsche called amor fati (“love of fate”): “My formula for
greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be
other than it is, not in the future, not in the past, not in all eternity. Not
merely to endure that which happens of necessity . . . but to love it.”
What this means is the following: There is much in life we cannot
control, with death as the ultimate example of this. We will experience
illness and physical pain. We will go through separations with people.
We will face failures from our own mistakes and the nasty malevolence
of our fellow humans. And our task is to accept these moments, and
even embrace them, not for the pain but for the opportunities to learn
and strengthen ourselves. In doing so, we affirm life itself, accepting all
of its possibilities. And at the core of this is our complete acceptance of
death.
We put this into practice by continually seeing events as fateful—
everything happens for a reason, and it is up to us to glean the lesson.
When we fall ill, we see such moments as the perfect opportunity to
retreat from the world and get away from its distractions, to slow

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down, to reassess what we are doing, and to appreciate the much more
frequent periods of good health. Being able to accustom ourselves to
some degree of physical pain, without immediately reaching for
something to dull it, is an important life skill.
When people resist our will or turn against us, we try to assess what
we did wrong, to figure out how we can use this to educate ourselves
further in human nature and teach ourselves how to handle those who
are slippery and disagreeable. When we take risks and fail, we welcome
the chance to learn from the experience. When relationships fail, we
try to see what was wrong in the dynamic, what was missing for us,
and what we want from the next relationship. We don’t cocoon
ourselves from further pain by avoiding such experiences.
In all of these cases, we will of course experience physical and
mental pain, and we must not fool ourselves that this philosophy will
instantly turn the negative into a positive. We know that it is a process
and that we must take the blows, but that as time passes our minds will
go to work converting this into a learning experience. With practice, it
becomes easier and quicker to convert.
This love of fate has the power to alter everything we experience
and lighten the burdens we carry. Why complain over this or that,
when in fact we see such events as occurring for a reason and
ultimately enlightening us? Why feel envy for what others have, when
we possess something far greater—the ultimate approach to the harsh
realities of life?