Right in the middle of your most profound difficulties, maybe the difficulties you've spent your whole life trying to avoid, there can be the birth of something new.Perhaps an illness, a loss, or a disappointment leads to a new kind of strength, intelligence, compassion, or kindness. Perhaps it leads to gratitude for your human faculties and for your relationships with people around you. And perhaps a deeper understanding of human suffering, and of the nature of life itself, that had previously been denied to you.Your attempts to turn away from difficulty, to pretend that all is just fine, can rarely come to much.They arise from your fear that your heart will be shattered, that there will be nothing of you left. But hardening your heart to keep you safe leaves you rigid and frozen, disconnected from what can support you most.Your attempts to stop difficulty getting to you also stop life from getting to you. And life will always, somehow, find its way through.And so this is the logic behind the words of Menachem Mendel of Kotzk
"Nothing is more whole than a broken heart"
Things are not always what they seem. Sometimes your attempts to hold harm at bay themselves cause you great harm.While you hold the world away, you can live only tentatively in the shadows of your own life.And eventually, perhaps, you turn towards it all in welcome or in acceptance, allowing yourself to feel so much that your heart can break open and life come flooding in.And you discover at last that difficulty and heart-brokenness are guests, uninvited and unwanted, who turn out to be the greatest teachers.
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You step off the train, in a hurry. So much to do.Will you get it all done? What will other people think? Will you keep your job? Where will you be in a year, five years? Can you pay the bills? Will you get what you want? When will you get to rest? Will you find fulfilment? Satisfaction? Will you have to keep on pushing, putting in such huge effort? Can you stay in control of it all?So many things to worry about.And, as always, the platform meets your foot with exactly the right amount of resistance so that you can stand. Gravity holds you. Generations of human invention and discovery make possible the lighting, the locomotive pull of the train, the sliding doors, the clothes you are wearing. The air composed of just the balance of oxygen and other gases that you can breathe. And the lives of your billions of ancestors in oceans and on land, together with the extraordinary creativity of evolution, give you your eyes, mind, heart, body - the five-fold symmetry of your hands and feet.All so that this, you, and your life, are possible.So what if, as well as your fear and worry, you oriented to the day with the sense of wonder invited by this extraordinarily unlikely confluence of circumstances?
If your requests to others aren't resulting in much in the way of action, you might like to look at whether you are actually asking anything at all.
Seen against the ever-present certainties of our lives - we will die, we will grow old, all that we build or create will eventually fall apart - differences between us drop away. We are all the same.It's so hard to live consciously with this in mind, to reach out across the space we imagine separates us and be open to one another. So hard to share our fear, our longing, our truest hopes. So hard to stay present long enough to look deeply into the eyes of others, to fall into them, allowing ourselves to know and be known.Why so difficult? Perhaps because of the shame we necessarily picked up along the way: sharpened every time we had to be told not to do this or that, to be this way or that way in order to fit in with our families or with our culture. Because of our self-doubt and our inner-criticism, which make it so hard to love ourselves fully (a pre-requisite for allowing ourselves to un-self-consciously love others). And because we are afraid.And so we hold back, always reserving some distance even from those who love us the most, because that way it feels as if we'll hold on to some measure of safety. Or we judge others, resent them or hate them, turning them into less than human-beings in our hearts, because it makes us feel better for a while.Even though we know that our deepest connection with one another is precisely that which can save us from the void.This is the great ethical work, so difficult to do and so necessary, which calls to us - learning the sensitivity to respond and be open to other people, who we take to be so different from us but with whom we share common ancestry, and common destiny.For we are intimately related.Family.
