The Isolation Years set a challenge: to exist in the human condition.
Everywhere we seek compensation.
We revile the threat of loneliness.
Silicon Valley understood this as an appetite.
At the last it is not division they monetised, but our unwillingness to sit with ourselves.
On any given day there will be suffering.
Distraction placates our hurt.
Like a sewer, draining us of ourselves. Or a funnel, extracting our life blood.
The opposite of distraction is noticing.
Why notice though, when pain is tethered to our condition?
“Avoid!” Cries the jester, cackling at his own duplicity.
Yet its pain that makes us sentient.
Antenna-d to all things.
But our cyber escapes?
A fragmentation of notifications, algorithms, beeps, pings, buzzes, doom-scrolling:
Frantic search for what can’t be found.
And so we live in our airless hemispheres, bombarded by irrelevant comets, pulled hither and tither, convinced that any given emotional reaction we stumble across expresses our own volition.
Really, that makes us formed people?
Accidental mirages more like.
Our sense of “self” is a ping pong ball:
Backhanded by this,
For-handed by that
This-ism and that-ism.
Modern consciousness.
Funny thing is, it is only your own pain that leads to renewal.
In it you are baptised every day.
Yes, the one place you avoid is the very place you find what you’re looking for.
But the pain itself is just a melody.
Its anchor is the rhythm itself.
These little bits of hurt are your children.
In their nurturing:
Growth.
Pain asks simply that it be tended.
Its contract devastates - it will not be negotiated with.
Its terms are final.
But its endowment limitless.
It’s not running from suffering where you find happiness.
It’s within it.
Can you find inspiration in the very places the world avoids?
If it is loneliness, could you align with it awhile?
Perhaps it will lend you new hearing.
What is it that the darkness says?
Decipher its whisper,
It holds great secrets in its code.
If it is heartbreak, is not a deeper Self available within your hurt?
At its base you don’t fall into dungeons.
You break into deeper understanding.
If it is procrastination,
Perhaps it asks you let go of all things awhile?
It’s within our breaking our healing is found.
Avoid it as you like.
Eventually we all get broken.
But not all of us choose to heal.
Why?
Nothing hurts more than the healing itself.
But walk its road and we find what we were missing all along;
Broken Wisdom.
2 Comments
No posts
What a lovely idea; that in the breaking is expansion. Beautiful.
I pinched the idea of healing from Joseph Campbell. I think the quote was "The healing hurts more than the injury".
I always return to Campbell...
Indeed, my heart has been broken so often and each time it grows larger and capable to hold more of the world.
“Nothing hurts more than the healing itself.” That one hit me and will work it’s way into the deeper layers with time, I know. Thank you… x