Life is trouble. Only death is not. To be alive is to unfasten

“Life is trouble. Only death is not. To be alive is to unfasten your belt and look for a fight.” So spoke Nikos Kazantzakis, the Cretan spirit who carried within him the fire of Homer and the anguish of modern man. These words, burning with truth, rise from the ancient soil of human struggle. They proclaim that to live is not to drift through days like a leaf on a quiet stream—but to throw oneself into the storm, to wrestle with fate, with doubt, with despair, and through that battle, to become. Life, Kazantzakis tells us, is trouble—not as a curse, but as its very essence. For without trouble, without resistance, without the necessity to fight, there is no motion, no growth, no awakening of the soul.

In the old tales, every hero knew this truth. Odysseus, after the fall of Troy, could have rested among the spoils of victory. Yet his heart longed for the sea, for peril and for journey. He knew, perhaps instinctively, that to be alive is to keep moving toward danger and discovery, not away from it. Every island he reached tested him; every storm purified him. His homecoming was not a return to peace, but a return through pain. Thus, he lived not as a man at ease, but as one unfastening his belt, ready for the next fight—not of fists, but of will, of courage, of the spirit that refuses to yield.

Kazantzakis himself lived in such a spirit. Born under the shadow of foreign rule, he grew up amid conflict and rebellion. His Greece was not at peace, and neither was his soul. He wandered the world, seeking truth among monks on Mount Athos, philosophers in Paris, and revolutionaries in Russia. Yet what he sought was never found outside himself—it was forged within, in the struggle to understand, to act, to create. For him, to live without this inner combat was to live half-asleep, chained by comfort and fear. Thus he cried out to all generations: Unfasten your belts! Face the tempest! Do not hide from the battle that gives meaning to your days!

There is a story from the life of Leonidas of Sparta, who stood with his three hundred at Thermopylae. When warned that the Persian arrows would darken the sky, he laughed and said, “Then we shall fight in the shade.” This is the same spirit that Kazantzakis exalts—the joy of meeting hardship head-on, the fierce gratitude for struggle itself. Leonidas did not fight for victory, for he knew death awaited him; he fought because to be alive—even for one more dawn—meant to stand against the tide, to declare through action that the human soul will not bow. That is the fight Kazantzakis speaks of—the eternal defiance of life’s chaos.

But this “fight” need not always be with sword or shield. It is the fight against cowardice, against despair, against the dullness that creeps into the heart when we seek only safety. It is the struggle to love when it is easier to hate, to create when it is easier to consume, to believe when all seems lost. Life’s greatest battles are not waged in fields, but in the secret chambers of the mind and the trembling chambers of the heart. There, each of us is called to be a warrior, to face the trouble that comes and to cry out—not “Why me?”—but “Let me face it well.”

Let none mistake Kazantzakis’s words for cynicism. He does not glorify pain for its own sake. He reminds us that trouble is sacred, for it is the furnace of transformation. Only the dead are at peace, for only they have ceased to change. The living, by contrast, must always be restless, imperfect, striving. A smooth road makes weak travelers; a rough one makes strong souls. When the world presses against you, remember—it is shaping you as the sculptor shapes marble, not to break you, but to reveal the form within.

So, what lesson shall we carry from this? It is this: do not flee from trouble. Do not curse the days of hardship, for they are your teachers. When fear whispers that you should tighten your belt and hide, unfasten it instead. Step forward into life’s storm. Work hard, love deeply, speak truth even when it costs you, and pursue what is right though the world scorns you. For only through struggle can you touch the edge of the divine and know the sweetness of being alive.

Remember this, O listener of ages to come: to live is to fight, not against the world alone, but for the light within yourself. Trouble is not your enemy—it is the proof that your heart still beats, that your spirit has not surrendered. So rise each morning as though born anew, ready to meet the day’s trials with open eyes and an unfastened belt. For as Kazantzakis knew well, life is not peace, nor comfort, nor safety—it is the grand, eternal struggle to become fully human.