Purpose?
Despite what so many people believe, the universe (or history, if we think of ourselves) has no purpose: it is enough to look at the immense starry sky on a summer night to understand it. Nor do I believe in the usefulness or lessons of suffering: what lessons can one of these child survivors of a boat, who will spend years in internment centres and hopefully end their days in a suburb of any European city, learn from their hardship? The only thing to do with suffering and pain is to fight against it or get out of the way if it becomes unappealable... We often talk of purpose as something that is delivered to us. But purpose is actually something we build ourselves and that we can share with others.
There is no purpose intrinsic to an experience, be it of joy or suffering or another. But we do construct our purposes with the elements that we encounter in our path.
And it is no justification, much less a reward, for living through horrors. It just is what it is, what we sometimes do to ourselves, we build these things. Maybe to cope, maybe for fun, maybe to grieve, maybe to care, maybe to remember, maybe to forget.
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This reminds me of an aphorism. "Life is not a game. Life is the art of playing games."
