"The greatest danger, as I see it in myself, is the danger of withdrawal into private worlds. We have to keep the channels in ourselves open to pain. At the same time it is essential that true joys be experienced, that the sunrise not leave us unmoved, for civilization depends on the true joys, all those that have nothing to do with money or affluence — nature, the arts, human love." -May Sarton
It may be easier to hide and to protect the heart with walls of reclusive resolve. To ensure that no pain gets through by allowing no interaction. But this cuts off the flow of joy.
If nothing gets through, Nothing gets through. And that means dwelling in a sparse and empty world. A barren ground- no grass, no color, no laughter, no tears. No blue sky, no thunder clouds, no rainbows, no effort or pain.
To live without feeling might sound safe to some. But to me it sounds like death.
I agree with Sarton. To maintain empathy, we must challenge ourselves to openly feel pain and suffering in hand with joy. We are encouraged to pursue happiness and, in fact, to demand or expect it. But we don't talk about its natural counterpart, pain, in the same terms.
Pain is regarded as inconvenient and unwelcome. It is categorized as something to get past and essentially considered to have no merit or place here. There is abundance and joy for all, they say, and to not be full of it comes across as a fault.
In this world of selfishness, which is encouraged and billed as the right way to be, we have forgotten we are not entitled to anything. It may not be your problem today, but is that how you truly want each human to conduct themselves?
Pain and suffering have been repurposed in today's society. They have been turned into tools for movies, sensational vehicles to drive stories and subjects for self help books, repackaged as vapid memes and short animated inspirations, all for sale. We are more than desensitized. Worse, we are captivated by and detached from not only our neighbor's pain and crying, but our own. We are medicated and motivated to accept only surface and shallow pleasures like children with cheap new toys.
To turn your face up at the rain of sorrow and let it soak and pelt your skin with raw emotion requires great strength and courage. But if you bravely meet this challenge, you can then feel for the person next to you when they are pelted with pain while you stand in the rays of sunlight. And if you could feel for that person, wouldn't you hold out your hand or at least your heart and help pull them through? If those in power and those of excessive wealth felt this pull, would they keep exploiting and gathering and amassing while others scrounge for basic life? Would judgment not subside and a more equal and unlabeled sensibility not reign?
This too shall soon pass, true, but it will pass in vain if there is no weight given to anything. We cannot just wait for it to pass, we must take accountability and not turn the cheek every time something makes us uncomfortable. Not grab the bars and stare into the cage with perverse interest as the bait is taken, the rage boils and the knife is sharpened. Not live in fear that a negative thought or dark day will eliminate all joy and steal our personal comfort.
To say "have a great day" is lovely, a desirable sentiment of course, but when it is said to someone coming from a funeral or visiting a hospital, the insensitivity is so obvious as to negate all meaning and all feeling. It leaves a person stranded on a bitter shore with nothing but salt and blisters. This happens often as we protect our fragile imagined shells of safety from all arrows of reality.
We must be brave. We must face and even appreciate pain alongside joy. To acknowledge and savor the full spectrum of emotion is to completely celebrate the human experience.
"Listen--are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?”
-Mary Oliver
“The purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.”
-Eleanor Roosevelt
"All real living hurts as well as fulfills. Happiness comes when we have lived and have a respite for sheer forgetting. Happiness, in the vulgar sense, is just a holiday experience. The life-long happiness lies in being used by life; hurt by life, driven and goaded by life, replenished and overjoyed with life, fighting for life’s sake. That is real happiness. In the undergoing, a large part of it is pain."
-DH Lawrence
"... the immutability of life, which is always joy and violence, pleasure and torture"
-Tiziano Terzani
"You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book... take a trip, or you talk with [someone], and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death."
-Anaïs Nin
"We did not ask for this room or this music. We were invited in. Therefore, because the dark surrounds us, let us turn our faces to the light. Let us endure hardship to be grateful for plenty. We have been given pain to be astounded by joy. We have been given life to deny death. We did not ask for this room or this music. But because we are here, let us dance."
-Stephen King, 11.22.63
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