A problem with quotes is that they are taken out of context.

It distorts their simple truth.

Their truth is based on the context they have emerged from. Their truth is the understanding a person has reached. It’s what they share with others in the hope that their experience can contribute to someone else’s experience.

That’s probably how suffering has been confounded with effort.

“No pain, no gain” is true. But was it there to install suffering as a means to have success?

For those, for whom effort is suffering, maybe.

For those, for whom failing is suffering, maybe.

For those, for whom uncertainty is suffering, maybe.

Choosing an effort, something one wants to do gives sense to the steps in the journey. Including those that aren’t easy and may lead to suffering. Consider the experience of making an effort, it connects us with our limits, it’s happening outside of our comfort zone, and pain may result.

My guess is, that everyone who has ever engaged in some serious sports training will have experienced how some exercises felt too difficult to be handled, how some worked out, and others didn’t. The way muscles and bones feel later will remind us of the effort we’ve put into the training. It’s not necessarily a sign of training quality, mainly a sign of a muscle one isn’t well acquainted with, a meeting with the unknown.

We may then experience this pain through suffering.

When suffering appears when we engage in effort, things are different. It is there before the pain appears. That’s when it seems that the effort isn’t our decision. It may also be when instead of being present with the effort we’ve chosen to look into the future and started expecting the pain that might result from our effort. Or it is looking into the past and staying focused on how we felt after the last training.

In such a case, the suffering we experience might be how anxiety or some other emotion decides to express itself.