There are two aspects to this. One is that suffering teaches. When you are happy, you tend to be complacent.
At the same time, misery is not the goal. The point is to HAVE suffered, for it to be past tense, for it to have been an education you undertook and completed. Self inflicted wounds are not the same as those inherent in life, and inherent in doing the work of inner healing and the growth of wisdom.
And stupidity, emotional stupidity, is a form of pain. Once you get through it, a second wave of regret comes upon you, and cannot but do so. This regret, this pain, justifies or at least explains much stupidity: it is protective. To grow beyond it is to face a wave not entirely unlike nausea. You have to rewrite your past, and to see what might have been, but you could not then see it.
I woke up this morning after a, for me, not bad night, considering I didn’t drink. And it took me a good thirty seconds to a minute to remember where I live and how I got here. I live in a contingent place, not a home. I live alone, and it occurred to me for the first time ever that I might have a roommate or two again, not to pay the rent, but for company. I have mistrusted people at such a fundamental level for so long, and needed such a large protective buffer, that this has never occurred to me, believe it or not.
We all grow older, and some part of this must be seeing with new eyes the past. I don’t really know how I could have done things that differently, given who I was then. It is a miracle I can see any of this now, in fact. My destiny, absent the excruciating work I continue to do, was numbness alternating with anger, profound blindness, and irremediable solitude.
Slowly, slowly, slowly the clouds lift, and you see not just what is, but also what happened. This process, too, is a life within life, which is the point of human existence. Finding out who you REALLY are is something very few are ever able to experience. I live in rocky terrain, but there is sunlight too, and the occasional waft of fresh air.