Sharing the Bittersweet Paradox

Lately, I've felt like I've been walking a tightrope between hope and despair.  Part of me wants to be strong for strength's sake.  Loved ones depend upon me.  I depend upon myself.  The weary part of me wants to give up.  It is drawn into a litany of "what ifs" and "I'm not good enough."  In the bottom of a well, I look up for signs of life above me.  I see nothing.

Thankfully, perceptions are not always accurate.  Feelings sometimes lie.  This morning, I opened up one of the many books I drag home from the library.  I'm a book glutton, always looking for more.  Yet, in my silly gluttony, words often jump off the page at just the right moment.  This seems less coincidence and more of a message sent just to me. 


This is what I read this morning in the book: The Exquisite Risk by Mark Nepo.

"One of the great difficulties in our human journey is our struggle to withstand and penetrate the nature of  [this] paradox.  So often, we fall to one side or the other, spending much of our energy either trying to avoid our suffering or being trapped in it.  When avoiding our suffering, we enter the colder realms of numbness and addiction.  When trapped within the labyrinth of our pain, we are subject to reenact the tensions of our suffering over and over.  In this struggle, not just to endure our suffering but to penetrate it, we can so easily slip from facing life and become actors in the drama of our bleeding, running from what pains us or constantly reliving it.  For sure, we all experience both the avoidance and the reliving, yet, when blessed,  we're able to drop below our pain and our avoidance of it, and briefly taste the joy at sorrow at once.  Moments like this give us a glimpse of the underlying freshness from which all feelings get their power.

It was Carl Jung who said, "Neurosis is the substitute for legitimate suffering"  What I think he means is that we tend to occupy ourselves with worrisome activities and preoccupations in order to divert ourselves from the necessary task of feeling what is ours alone to feel.  Rather than feel our loneliness, we run nakedly to strangers.  Rather than feel the brunt of being abandoned , we will construct excuse after excuse to reframe the relationship.  Rather than feel our sadness and disappointment, we will replay the event to ourselves and other like a film with no ending.  It is this cultivation of neurosis and all its scripts that feeds the drama of our bleeding"    (Nepo p. 34)

These words cut straight to my heart.  My heart understood what my mind had forgotten.  In that moment, I decided to sit quietly and wait for hope and despair to meet.  Restlessness left me.  Gone was the desire to run from my feelings.  My mind has expected to face unbearable pain.  The pain that filled the space was mine and mine alone.  It was bittersweet and tolerable.  One side pain, one side peace, satisfaction, hope; they existed side by side within.  I sat with the silence and then got up to start my day aware of this exquisite paradox that I am, that we all are.

Words have not come easily lately.  I wanted to write something upbeat, funny, inspiring, helpful.  Instead, I feel like an empty void.  It's hard to be funny when you're feeling sad.   I wanted to be rescued from my life.  I wanted to run from the cold hard reality of losing our home, of expecting not to have a job much longer, of not being to provide adequately for my family, from all the disappointments and aftershocks of misfortune. 

It is a heavy load to carry.  As much as I try to reframe my experience and wring some thing positive from it, there are times when circumstance warrants sadness.  As much as I try to soldier on, the truth is sometimes it's really hard.  Sometimes, I feel very sad about all that has happened and will happen.  Unfortunately, I have swung back and forth between denial and painful rumination.  It hasn't been helpful.

What seems to be most helpful is to simply admit it.  To sit with the feelings and let them tell me what they've come to say and then to honestly share them.  The sharing helps me make sense out of what seems senseless.  In between the feelings falling onto the page, a faint picture begins to emerge.    If I remain patient, honest and open, I begin to glimpse something wonderful hiding behind the sadness.  Together they make up the fabric of life, of my life.