The muscles of an athlete are not built up in a day. In order to gain physical strength and improve their skills, they constantly have to train themselves. Only when they surpass the threshold of their muscle capacity can they gain the fruit of their efforts.
The maximum threshold of your muscles is the point at which you have exhausted all of their strength. When the critical limits of the muscles have been reached, the muscular tissues that have been tightly tied together become loose or are even painfully torn. However, the torn muscles are repaired within a short time. If we use the repaired muscles again, they are damaged again and the damaged muscles are then repaired once again. Through this process, their maximum thresholds gradually increase.
For example, a person who could barely do 10 push-ups today, can do 12 the next day, 15 the day after that, and 17 push-ups a few days later. By overloading our muscles, we can increase the maximum thresholds little by little. Thus, we do not need to regard the soreness that we experience from overloading the muscles as suffering.
Our minds, too, have a maximum threshold. When we feel like we’ve reached the limit where we can no longer bear a heartbreaking sorrow, we do not need to be dismayed or disappointed. Our hearts will be strengthened as much as we are hurt and tomorrow’s limit will surpass that of today.