Holding It All Together

 

In the bathroom, getting ready for the day, I look in the mirror and pause. I am deeply aware that while I blow-dry my hair, across the world there are people in bomb shelters, people without electricity and access to food and water, refugees waiting in foreign lands as their hometowns get reduced to rubble, people fighting and dying. How do we hold this suffering and go about our days as usual? Nothing about this moment in time feels "normal" and yet life here moves at its regular pace. Garbage gets picked up; the kids go to school; we go to work; I think about what to make for dinner. And then I see the images in the news and my heart hurts.

It doesn't feel right to go on as usual and yet, what is there to do? It feels this way when someone you love dies and you walk out of the hospital in a daze as the world moves on around you. No matter how many times I open the New York Times and get updated, the situation is what it is and we are here holding this proximal peace and remote suffering. This is the plain and simple truth of it. We learn to hold seemingly contradictory things simultaneously as we go through life. As odd as it sometimes feels, it does not have to be a problem. If we are having a joyful moment, we don't have to feel guilt or shame and if we are struck by an arrow of pain for those we cannot help, we don't have to fall into overwhelm and deny all joy. Just as in a hospital, on one floor a person dies and on another floor, at the very same moment, a baby is born; a patient gets a terminal diagnosis and another is informed that their cancer is in remission. Joy and pain coexist and we are capable of holding it all. We don't have to push one away to feel the other. We don't have to judge either feeling as more worthy of the moment. We don't have to compare suffering.

If you find yourself emotionally struggling with the balance of your own life with its joys and trials here and what is happening "over there," you are not alone. Many of us are trying to wrap our minds and hearts around it. Our brain tells us we need "to do" something. Of course it does. And yet, there isn't much to be done, but to come together and rest in our "heart of compassion" for all of what goes on, for all of what we are asked to hold. We can let it remind us to go gently through these days and bring kindness to the forefront a bit more, because the whole world could use it.

Wishing you all inner steadiness and peace as we navigate this life together.

🌻
Jean