It’s easy to get swallowed up in your own misery.
It’s all that you can see until something BIGGER and GREATER than that misery stretches into your world and DIPS it’s finger into your heart.
Sometimes those fingers wrap around you and let you know you’re not the only one with misery, and sometimes they point far off to tell you that your misery is the misery of a privileged and very blessed person who has not known real loss.
Each of us has our own misery
Sometimes the pain feels like something we deserve, Sometimes the pain feels like something we need in order to hold on to something we lost. Sometimes we keep our pain because it becomes part of us, and to let go, feels like losing ourselves and our dignity or even our comfort.
...Sometimes we become so infused with that pain, the only way to live is to inject and subject others to pain.
Tonight I read about Victoria, a young American born Nigerian girl who lost her proud, beautiful spirit in the wake of female circumcision. It is a beautifully written story about two young, kindred souls standing together as one of them navigates the exclusion, shame, and brutality of this custom.
This is not about that brutal custom (though I will give it my voice)
This is not about guilting you into feeling better about your miseries because there is always worse.
THIS, is about pain and the big picture of life swirling around us at a hundred million seconds covering us over and over and over with more and more pins and needles and bruising and damaging our hearts again and again.
It’s about seeing other people’s pain and learning to stand beside them in their silence if we can, and it’s about seeing other people’s pain and finding the courage to muddle through our own.
All people, know pain.
I don’t think misery should be measured or invalidated. But I do think some misery deserves a broader picture because sometimes our misery is stuck in a space so narrow we can’t get out.
You are not alone.
You feel misery. So does your neighbor. It does not matter so much sometimes how we come by that misery. But let us see each other and stand beside each other, even abstractly, and find the courage to move beyond that pain.
For me, reading this story drew me out of my world. Sometimes we weep together, and sometimes we weep alone. But we are never, never, the only ones. It doesn’t take my pain away but it makes my world bigger, which makes my pain smaller. And suddenly I have the courage draw my glazed over miserated eyes toward something beyond myself.
It’s idealistic, I know, to see us all solely as humans muddling through this life often in pain (and sometimes beauty) when in reality it’s so, so, much more complex than that. But when I see life like that, everything becomes so simple. Motives, silence, mistakes, cruelty and even evil all seem so simple. So easy to overlook and heal and correct. So easy to move out of our own pain.
There is pain (and hurt) behind it all. It’s all stacked one on another. We just need someone to sit beside us. We just need to see that we are part of something bigger, that our pain is not the only pain.
In my world, if we could all see that, all the time, there wouldn’t be so many complications…so much evil and hate.
We’d reach our fingers into a hardened heart and say: “I acknowledge your pain” and that heart would melt and be sorry for taking your toy truck because really, they just felt left out. And we wouldn’t care what they did because it just was about some form of pain and we knew that.
and we would sit beside each other and breathe because we are not alone.
And then we’d share a cookie.
It’s idealistic, it isn’t the whole story…. and not even I can operate in a world as beautiful and connected as that.
But what if we all could? Even sometimes. There would be less pain. And maybe more interactions where we reach inside each other’s hearts and say“I see your joy, I see your beauty” instead of seeing so much pain.
It would be nice.
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