Samuel Beckett's aphorism seems to reflect my stance best these days.
I know there is much to be grateful for, yet I also have to be grateful for the cross I bear. It's a familiar pattern, full of fleeting fears around abandonment, resignation, and defeatism.
Without the need to get into particulars, it feels so familiar to me I often wonder if this is my natural disposition. Is the desolation more real than the consolation?
Yet, there is something I get closer to in the suffering. I sense a richer humanity that is in tune to the suffering in others. I am not as dismissive of the subtleties of pain despite the contraction that takes me over. While it may be a psychological desolation that takes me there, there is also a spiritual consolation in all of this.
I am reminded of some words by Parker Palmer...
That without pain, there is no joy.
That from despair, hope emerges.
That out of death, new life always emerges.
That real life hurts.
That real life is beautiful.
That hearts are meant to love and live and breathe and connect.
That hearts are meant to break.
Palmer notes that there there are two kinds of hearts that break. The first is the unresolved broken heart that inflicts its pain onto others. I am definitely not immune to this. When in the pain, the horizon looks shallow. Possibilities seem bleak. I feel recoiled from what is. I want to lash out with sadness and anger.
Palmer also points to another heart that is broken open “into the largeness of life, into greater capacity to hold one's own and world's pain and joy.” Oddly in my contracted suffering, I can simultaneously sense into this world too.
There is a Hasidic tale where the rabbi is asked why does the Torah ask its followers to place the words upon our hearts — and not in our hearts? The rabbi answers, “It is because as we are, our hearts are closed, and we cannot place the holy words in our hearts. So we place them on top of our hearts. And there they stay until, one day, the heart breaks, and the words fall in.”
Maybe this is where suffering can move us forward, to a larger and deeper embrace of the wisdom that has been imprinted in our soul.
As one sage once said: “Life can be transcended, or it can be repeated, but it cannot be fulfilled.” It seems the real challenge is to live in the tension of immanence and transcendence. Or as Palmer says, stand in the “tragic gap,” the “gap between what is and what could and should be.”
It's in this tragic gap where all the suffering can enrich and embody a deeper joy that eventually ensues.
And so for now, I'll go on.