Many times
the biggest help you can be
is to turn a listening ear towards another
to hear everything they have to say
no matter how troubling how painful how confusing
to give up for a while
being another judge, another critic, another fixer of troubles
to be a welcome to all of it
all of it
and in your seeing and hearing embrace
find out how healing
being witness can be
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There are millions of books that you'll never read.Millions of films you'll never see.Places you'll never go to.People you'll never meet.Experiences you'll never have.Do you chase after what's unattainable with resentment and frustration, raging against life's limits? Or open in gratitude at life's richness?Here's George Steiner with a beautiful account of the move from fear to wonder on this very question, involving a fascinating story of the discovery and reburial of thousands of terracotta Chinese warriors.[youtube=http://youtu.be/Q1z3sMGYjNk]
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An unchangeable feature of life is that, at every moment, you find yourself inescapably in some situation or other - perhaps one that you did not choose.And however magnificent or terrible it is, you are, conclusively, just here, at this moment in the life that you are living.No manner of denial (and all the suffering that comes with it) can change that your life continues from this moment, this particular configuration, and not from another.And so acceptance of life - as opposed to fighting life - is not 'putting up with things' but responding fully from where you are. Not pretending to yourself or to others that you are somewhere else.Every situation, however glorious, however unwelcome, has its own possibilities. And you have precisely this hand to play in whatever way you can.Many paths lead from this place.Will you go to sleep to yourself, or step in to this, the one and only life you have?
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What struck me most at Sunday's Yom Hashoah ceremony was the way in which each of the survivors who spoke had committed themselves to life.One woman, who'd entered Auschwitz as a teenager, had dedicated herself in adulthood to teaching young people about the dangers that come with ignorance of one another. Now nearing her 90s, she was fiery and warm and loving and energetic. It was clear how passionately and completely she'd taken up both living and being of service to a life much bigger than her own.Another speaker described how being exemplars of love and kindness had become central for her parents during the time after the genocide, when they'd chosen to raise a new family in the long shadow of those dark years, still unable to speak of their shattering personal experiences and their grief at the deportation and murder of their two-year old daughter.A dear friend of mine told me recently that the artist Roman Halter, himself a survivor, used to say to her how important it is to trust life - to turn towards life's goodness and not lose ourselves in self-doubt and worry.And Etty Hillesum, who wrote diaries first from her home in the Netherlands during the early years of the oppression and, later, from Westerbork transit camp (the holding camp for Dutch Jews on their way to Auschwitz, where she was murdered in 1943) wrote from the camp about her sense that 'that one day we shall be building a whole new world. Against every new outrage and every fresh horror, we shall put up one more piece of love and goodness, drawing strength from within ourselves. We may suffer, but we must not succumb.'I write all of this in no judgement of the countless millions who lived and died in those times - and in other horrors - and were irreparably broken by the experience. Which of us could be sure we'd be any different? But I'm struck by our responsibility in the light of all this, and how easily we can confuse ourselves about the times we are living in. This moment in the early 21st century is full of uncertainty and many dangers, yes. But however bad we fear things are, and however frightened we get about it, we can and must learn from those who found in themselves a way to live, and to turn towards life, in the midst of the most unimaginable horror and its aftermath.That they were able to plant flowers that grew from the darkness leaves us, who right now live in not nearly such dark times, with the responsibility to find a way to do the same.
At every moment in life, you can choose whether to be a blessing or a curse to others.How you open the door to her when she comes come, how you reach across for him when you wake, how you speak when you order your coffee, how you move through a crowded train, how you are with a crying child, how you put out the bins.How you answer the phone, how you begin a meeting with your pressured and anxious team, how you write the next email, how you announce your intentions, how you respond when you're hurt, how you listen to the request of a lost stranger.The capacity to bless will have its seeds in your capacity to bless yourself, which always means welcoming yourself and what you're experiencing rather than denying it, raging against it, or judging yourself for it.Will you turn towards that of you which loves without dismissing, or denigrating, or criticising it for its impracticality?Will you turn towards your fear and acknowledge how afraid you are with dignity, rather than pretending it isn't true?Many of the curses in the world arise from our denying our own very basic, vulnerable, mysterious, confusing humanity. Much of that comes from being afraid and pretending that we're not - a curse upon ourselves which curses others as we go. And many blessings come from the discovery that this one, brief, precious life simply won't go exactly how we want it.Of course, it's rarely as simple as just 'deciding' to bless as we go. Too much of us has been shaped by years of habit for that. But the good news is that the capacity to bless - which is given to all of us - grows with practice. And that you can start today.
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This morning, after swimming, I overhear a conversation between two men who are sitting by the water. One has lost his sunglasses on an earlier swim and is quite distressed.'They were expensive. Armani.' he says. 'I paid a lot of money for them. And they are the third pair I've lost this summer'.He is too agitated to be present with his friend who, after some minutes of listening, says 'You seem really shaken up by this, too shaken up even to really be interested that I'm here with you. You're saying the same thing, over and over again. But,' and here he pauses, 'tell me something. Did you enjoy having them? Did they bring you pleasure? Because although you've now lost them, for a while you did have them too'.For a while, you did have them.And at that moment it occurs to me that this is true for everything, and for all of us. We wail and fret about what we lose, and rightly, because our loss is so often a source of suffering for us. But we will all lose our sunglasses, eventually, just as we will lose all our possessions, our friendships, our bodies, and everything we know.And because losing is terrible and difficult to bear, we can spend our lives fretting about what's yet to lose, and clinging madly to it, or becoming consumed with longing or remorse for what we've lost.And all the while forgetting that, for a time, we did have all of this, and missing the wonder that there is anything at all - sunglasses, friendships, work, life - worth having enough that its loss matters to us in the first place.
As we encounter each of life's difficulties, we get to choose:Consider ourselves cursed or mistreated, as if we are owed freedom from hurt, pain or confusion. As if life owes us happiness. As if we are meant to be in control of everything. This is, essentially, a fight against life as it is.Or draw on difficulty as part of life's path, an opportunity to turn more deeply into life rather than away from it.And while, with each successive difficulty or joy, we find that we understand life's movement less and less, perhaps this way we learn to live it more and more.
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[after Jules Renard - "As I grow to understand life less and less, I learn to live it more and more"]
The myth of the Garden of Eden is so brilliant and powerful because it expresses our sense of having profoundly lost something essential and elemental from our lives, something we need.
We long to return to the peace and beauty of the garden. It's a place we feel we once knew but from which we’ve been exiled, and we imagine there’s something we can do to get back so that everything can be alright once again. When we return we will at last stop feeling so separate from the world, so alienated from it. It will be a place where we’re fully welcomed and loved, where we don’t need to strive any more, where the resources of the world will effortlessly meet our needs, and where we no longer need to feel afraid or ashamed. And in this way the myth of the garden promises to fill an enormous hole that we don’t otherwise know how to address.
Perhaps we’ll meet the right person, a friend or lover or saviour whose acceptance and care for us will be our return (maybe it’s this sense that draws us towards particular people in our lives in the first place). Or perhaps it will come through fame, a big enough bank balance, or through attaining a certain status or prominence in our work or our wider culture. We can become convinced we’ll be readmitted to the garden by following a spiritual path, by being kind, or by cultivating depth, integrity, knowledge, power, courage, or equanimity. Maybe receiving the right email in our inbox will do it (is this why we check so often?).
We wonder if we haven't found our way back because we didn’t try hard enough. So we keep on with the same strategies, despairing that they don’t seem to work out.
Our suffering is magnified by our finding that nothing and no-one we encounter is able to return us as we’d hoped. We are terrified that it’s our own failing, and if not that then the unfairness of the world towards us, that keeps us away.
The story rings true because we all know Adam and Eve’s loss at loss first-hand. We began our lives in the wondrous and cushioned embrace of the womb, deeply connected to the being of another inside whose body we floated, totally and unquestioningly cared for. And now we find ourselves thrown into the messy physical world where nothing ever quite goes our way, where we don't feel held, where we feel anguish as well as joy, and where we have to take responsibility for ourselves. The pain of leaving the garden is nothing less than the pain of living in the world with the memory of a once simpler time when we experienced only our oneness with all of it.
The Eden story’s brilliance is not only that it so perfectly describes our deep longing, but that it also calls into question our wish to return. Adam and Eve are children - barely aware of themselves, barely able to know anything, unable to distinguish between this and that, between actions that bring wholeness to the world and actions that destroy. They can remain in the garden only as long as this remains the case. Once they eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, once they develop the capacity to engage with the world in its fullness of both dark and light, once they grow up, the spell of the garden is broken and they have to face the world as it is. A return to the garden would not be the idyll we imagine because it would mean giving up the capacities and faculties that make us adults, most notably the capacity to discern, and the capacity to choose.
So, how should we live in the light of this? One path, for sure, is the path of nihilism, the certainty that all is lost and that, faced with the prospect that nothing ever works out apart from death, nothing is of meaning. The other path, which seems much more life giving to me, is one in which we simultaneously turn towards that of the garden which is already present in the world (beauty, love, compassion, the wonders of nature are just a few) and towards doing what we can to reduce the suffering that we know cannot be avoided completely. This second path also means learning to live with the hole-like feeling of incompleteness - perhaps to be human is always in some way to feel incomplete - and yet continuing to bring as much of our capacity for goodness and integrity as we can. The second path means giving up the idyllic myth of Eden for the much more grown up task of living with dignity and compassion with the world as it is and us as we are. And in order to do this, we have to give up on our fantasy of returning to the garden, a fantasy that adds difficulty to difficulty and so readily has us hold back what we could bring.
And, as well as this, there is another possibility, which is to look deeper into life than we are yet accustomed to doing. The separateness of our bodies so convinces us we are separate from everything and from one another - and it's the very compelling feeling of distance that has us long so urgently to return. The anguish of this, and the longing of it, is very familiar to me as I write this today. But from another perspective, which I glimpse now and then, we all arise from a wholeness from which we have never been apart - call it the universe, 'the one', emptiness, God, life itself - there are many names. In those moments when we get to see that we’re all together an expression of something which has always been our home, perhaps we get to relax our desperation a little, and this in turn allows us to contribute without trying all the time to grasp too tightly something that is already here.
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Purposeful - the projects we're committed to that we know we're committed to. That which we feel we have chosen.Purposive - the projects we're committed to that we don't know we've chosen, and which show up in our actions more than they show up in our minds.Our being human is an inevitable mix of purposeful and purposive, and much of our difficulty comes from the conflicts between the two. When I've purposefully chosen to be a kind and loving parent, for example, at the same time as having a purposive commitment to being right, or never being criticised. Or when I've purposefully chosen to lead others in a way that's wise and inclusive, alongside a purposive commitment to looking good, or being seen as perfect, or being in control.The trouble with our purposive commitments is their invisibility to us, which so often means we take them not to exist. But it's these very commitments that others often see most clearly.And it's in uncovering what's purposive for us, through careful observation and through the loving support of others, that we have a chance of freeing ourselves up to do what we intend. And a chance of undoing the silent battle with ourselves that causes us and others so much suffering, and which has us hold back so much of what we're here to do.
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I have long loved the hopefulness of the Jewish tradition - the way it roots itself in the realness and responsibility of this moment, understanding that the life we are living is the only one we can be sure of, that it's vanishingly short, that there is much yet to do be done, and that each of us has the possibility of contributing.And I appreciate very much how this hopefulness is informed by realism about what's possible.'It is not your duty to complete the work [of improving the world]...', writes Rabbi Tarfon, a 2nd century sage, '...but neither are you free to desist from it'.There it is. What needs doing in the world is so much bigger than any one of us can muster - a realisation that could so easily be a source of despair. But in Tarfon's hands it's a call to possibility and responsibility. We have to begin, even though we may not quite understand what we are beginning, even though the results of our labours may only benefit those who come long after us, who we will never know. And when we find ourselves in the darkness, when nothing seems possible, when we are overwhelmed by the magnitude of things and floored by our smallness - one step.And then one step.And then one step.But at the same time, we can lay a trap for ourselves with hope, which the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus understands well. Hope, particularly in the form of desire, he says, can be a source of great suffering. It can leave us permanently dissatisfied with the life we're living, even when we have reason to be grateful.'Do not spoil what you have', he says, 'by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.'What you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.We know how that goes. We imagine a new car will make us happy, only to find a few days into owning it that we have our eye on a newer model. We imagine that power, or position, or a house, or a new relationship, or a change of government, or more money in our pocket will be the answer, only to find ourselves with the same emptiness and longing transposed to a new situation.We so easily find our lives consumed by an endless and insatiable comparison between what is and what we imagine could be.Epicurus' own solution to this difficulty was a kind of radical simplicity and acceptance. He was an advocate of the virtues of living a life of obscurity - not trying to change too much, nor having dreams that are too big, so that we can appreciate and be genuinely grateful for what is already in front of us.It seems to me that to be human is to inhabit the tension between Epicurus and Tarfon - learning to cherish the gifts we have, and at the same time hoping for and working towards something much better both for ourselves and for those around us. And it is, as far as I can tell from my own life, a genuine tension for many of us - pulled as we are between our deepest, most heartfelt unmet longings and our wish to feel happy or at least fulfilled right where we are.It can be a confusing and painful place to be, particularly when we get caught up in the anguish of knowing we can't have the world be just the way we want it. Or when our hope and acceptance are extinguished and smothered by resentment, fear, and despair at our inability to control things.Perhaps the work of a human life is to learn to inhabit the tension between is and could be or, more fully, to be a bridge that unites both poles. Here maybe we can learn the craft of living in the world as it is, knowing we don't have to save it, and at the same time being the ones who commit ourselves to the one next, hopeful, step.
