The Very Temporary Nature of Suffering

This is a series of essays that have not appeared before on this blog. They were taken from my book, Surrendering to Joy , which I wrote in the year immediately following my daughter Teal’s death in 2012.

Suffering seems to be all around me these days. Oh, yes, I almost forgot: I see how I suffer, too.

One friend is angry at her dentist. Another is furious with her former spouse. What Spirit is showing me more clearly than ever is that this suffering and resistance we cook up time and time again is both critical and temporary. It’s simultaneously a fearsome reality and a grand illusion.

In truth, our suffering is nothing more than an excuse to check out and play small for a while. Honestly, we may need it on some level. For we plug into our pain just like a lamp enjoys a socket. We literally become electrified with fear, greed, envy, hatred, resentment, anxiety, terror, panic and lust for all that we believe we cannot have.

We become consumed by these emotions until the moment we decide to look up – and then somehow it all starts to lift.

Teal was a big one for moving through these stormy seas quickly. Even as a very small child she would have her rant. Then, just as suddenly as it came on, she would give her little shoulders a shake and move straight back to joy.

I used to quietly admire this quality of hers, for she was 100 percent authentic in her upset. There would be a panic that her math homework wasn’t going well and she would flunk a test. Or when she was older, there might be a tearful breakdown around “what the hell am I doing with my life?” Grief would rattle through her at warp speed, and there was something healthy about it.

We used to laugh that she needed to have her ‘two-week cry’. Every couple of weeks, pretty much on schedule, Teal would call me up and have a sob about amorphous things. Sometimes it would even be about nothing at all; she just needed to cry. I’d listen and she would move through it. Then her usual radiance would come streaming back.

So Teal taught me about the temporary nature of suffering. For it was always with great grace and apparent ease that she moved in and out of her pain. Never once did she cling to it because she thought it would get her something or because she “needed” it. She expressed her sadness simply because it was there.

How easy it is for us to assume there will be some kind of reward or payoff at the end of our suffering. For me, that shows up as the angry thought that “So and so is really going to pay this time!”

Yet there is no reward to toxic spews, just as there is no justification.

For many years I labored hard in the mines of advertising as an underpaid and, I thought, unappreciated junior copywriter. Day by day I wrote ads for things like “Doan’s Little Back Pills.” Then I’d walk away at 5 o’clock hating my work, hating myself and convinced this life I’d created was all a big mistake.

In these sad years, I told myself I could do no better, that I somehow needed this ill-suited job. And so I forgot God’s most sacred principle: We are all divine in our ways, and when we force ourselves to hang onto something that doesn’t fit, it’s a sacrilege.

This is the thing that I notice again and again these days.

Suffering can be a choice, like a punishment we feel we have to be oddly loyal to.

In this way, I felt I had to stay in the love relationships in which I suffered and hung on month after difficult month.

All of it fed my persistent, dogging sense of shame at the time. And so it is with all prolonged suffering. We hang on rather than walk away because we mistakenly believe it’s all that we’ve got.

But it’s not, friends. In fact, it’s far from it.

Only by making the conscious choice to let go of the pain and swim back to wholeness can we move ahead, tiny snail-inch by snail-inch. Isn’t that the purpose of our slow crawl here on Earth?

The point of life and all of its hurdles isn’t to prove anything to anyone. It’s to discover, leaf by leaf, and to unfold, petal by petal.

The purpose of our struggle is to set us right again, simply by learning to maneuver through life.

Only by wading through the pain to the other side can we finally, actually grow. So we right the child within us who was abused. In doing so, we discover compassion for ourselves and the world.

It is in setting our minds to reclaim our wholeness that we build our most effective strategy for life. That wholeness demands that we let go of our suffering. So I become more and more aware of my own fragile little cages of pain, and I let go of them, one by one.

Once released, through prayer, meditation, and sometimes through forgiveness and making amends, they transform into flowers lifting into the sky. No longer needing to serve any earthly purpose, they disappear and are forgotten.

So I find I can stand a little taller and stretch a little further, empowered once again by the grace of God flowing freely through my veins.

It feels good to be alive.

***

Reprinted from my book, Surrendering to Joy.

 

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