The Perennials of Life

A Meditation on the Nature of Suffering

Soul by benteschlick on DeviantArt

A few weeks ago, I was sleepwalking through life. My eyes were blindfolded by the comforts of mundane simplicities of ordinary life. My heart closed upon itself like a reluctant bud that refuses to awaken from its peaceful slumber because opening up demanded complete presence and total participation. Engaging actively with the present moment was not something I was ready to confront yet. I was aware of this state of consciousness but unaware that it could be practiced into being. The proof of its natural occurrence was all around me, in nature and within its endless cycles of birth and death, there is an affirmative breaking open that is happening to evolve everything to its full potential. The bud awakens to open up into a flower, that lures insects by its color and sweet aroma to land on it and carry pollen on their minuscule hairy legs and pollinate thousands of flowers which magically emerge out of their incubation period from the green womb of Mother Earth. And before you realize it, the green canopies and shrubs are impregnated with rainbow-freckled fruits announcing the arrival of spring, and there goes summer and monsoon too, with their distinct manifestations. With each passing season, nature renews itself, but it doesn't look like it used to only a season ago, it changes constantly. Maybe death is all but a transformation from one form to another, a total metamorphosis to strip familiarity and hence evoke a love beyond attachment. 

The universe is a masterpiece in how it regularly self-organizes and destructs in order to create a vivid spectacle of nature. I realize now that, beyond this point, it is impossible to keep nestling in my restful slumber. Life is calling my existence to action, and I have to break open in order to respond to its beckoning. The absence of recent cathartic experiences was already paralyzing me into a zombie-like trance that percolated into my creative life. I do not condone wiring your life with problematic behavioral patterns just for the sake of juicing your creativity, in fact, I abhor the ‘tortured genius’ archetype. But to open up to the massive shifts of life’s tectonics is a whole another level of interpersonal growth. 

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Vortex of Truth

With all the personal crises hitting home with my human journey, I am propelled to look deeper and understand suffering and its many aspects. I am convinced that there is foundational truth beneath all these layers of desolation and pain. But the truth itself is multifaceted and will take a long time to unravel after soft breathing for years in pain’s turbulence. I am not afraid or hesitant to undertake the journey because I am set up for this journey long before I was even born. The mystical trajectories of the human life path compel me to wander into self-discovery as much as it terrifies me. Straightening the oblique line of understanding of self is another way to understand the world better because we live this life by extending our essence outwards in orbits around who we are and what we are here for. In simpler words, at any given point in time, in our respective lives, we project and create a physical manifestation of our state of consciousness. We have been given these vast fields of experience to play within, and the only imposed limitation is that our experiences remain innately human. We run and stumble through our playground extending the definitions of what it means to be truly human. 

Holding vigil around chaos like observing a problematic child with stern attention, we try to make sense of unfathomable concepts of death, loss, grief, pain, and suffering. And the more we intellectualize them the more lost we feel, as individuals and as a collective. On some days our rationalizations make sense, and on others, they resound of utter nonsense. I have been dancing in this tornado for a while now, and I can tell you that the only way to keep moving is to keep moving. There are no secrets, there is no hidden meaning, and there are no final answers, there is only lifting the kingpins of karma (action) and moving forward with a sturdy spine and rigid feet. Maybe the truth is that we are broken open to spit out our truths with the intensity and honesty of an awakened volcano. Maybe the truth is that we are here to extend our budding consciousness to help the vectors pollinate our expressed experiences to help the collective growth. 

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We Bleed the same 

The other day while traveling back home after visiting my ailing father, my cab halted at a red signal for a few minutes. On my right was a gym equipment store in front of which I noticed a woman sitting on the concrete pavement, it was raining as she smiled at her daughter who was at a little distance. She was telling her something intently, wrapping single roses in a conical plastic and fashioning a red ribbon around them as if they were single flower bouquets. The harsh reality of her life looked like a storybook anecdote to me - tragically poetic. What must be her story, I thought, what could be her suffering that she is masterfully hiding behind her busy demeanor, what turn of events would have brought her at the present moment - selling roses to indifferent travelers on route to attend their self-interest, as the city grows moldy in monsoon. There she is, one human being, in a sea of billions, trying to make ends meet, trying to exist against the adversities of her circumstances, trying to survive. How must it feel to be like her? To be in her shoes, to be probably the only responsible parent of a young girl. As per statistics, her circumstances are not singular, most Indian women from lower economic backgrounds are often single parents to their children, lifting all child-rearing responsibilities on their own. The statistics also say these women often ignore their responsibilities and fail to provide for their children. But here she is, in flesh and bones, a story defying the statistics, wearing her tattered self with a smile, sharing an authentic moment with her daughter. 

The Thistle and The Rose

Society tends to generalize people, we often forget their humanity, their individuality, the power and perseverance of their spirit. We bunch them under labels of social studies, analysis, and statistics, the social scientists then like to theorize the magnitude of pain and suffering of particular groups based on certain aspects of their immediate life scenarios. However, the truth is that the nature of suffering, even though magnified by our socio-economic circumstances, hits us all in the same way. The sound of a breaking heart echoes the same despite the fineness of marble or the coarseness of concrete under one’s feet. When tragedy strikes we isolate ourselves from others, hide in our self-constructed shells of shame, guilty about our circumstances, tired of our suffering. This is because we are painfully aware that the world prefers a constant source of optimism, and we are deficient at the moment, to provide it. We feel less useful to the world, stagnant under the weight of our suffering. When our unique truth is rife with despair, we keep them in. We don’t permit the world to see us surfing through sorrow, we maintain the image of what they want us to be, and we comply with plastered smiles as our eyes fail to hide the weariness. We are a deceptive species except for our eyes, those glistening marbles always give us away.  

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Cradling Light in Broken Bassinets 

I find it hard to admit my humanity. I falter and err; flounder and hurt as much as any of us. I have been raised and conditioned to conceal my emotions. I have been taught that emotion is a sign of weakness. Growing up, I learned that anger is the only acceptable social emotion and anything else that makes you seem soft or impressionable should not be displayed. Needless to say that I have been angry at most things for almost all of my life. The brokenness of our planet, the deprivations of its people, inequality, ecological holocaust, history of discrimination, slavery, genocide, patriarchy, racism, wars - every social injustice, you name it, and it angered me. Little did I know that whom I thought was anger, her true name was grief. My anger was only a shadow that I wore like a personality to prevent myself from showing my broken heart. All these years my heart was at war with my mind, while I wrote. I read and wrote these stories of human suffering, and I suffered with them, for them. I swam the waters of grief frequently here at Berkana. I felt in spirit all the exploitation and abuse, the rapes and massacres, that the women and girls of Berkana suffered in their realities, the stories of these humans who found their resting place in my archive. I have cried for people who lost their loved ones before, and I cried as if I lost what is mine too, this suffering is not novel to me. I know this suffering, I know this pain, this pain is not mine alone. 

Suffering tills the soil of our being, preparing it for the seeds of growth to yield. These seeds are sown deep within the open crevices made by grief. The constant passing of a stream of suffering from one end of the trench to the pool which stores strength and wisdom is a necessary movement in human life. Suffering is neither optional nor avoidable. It is a force of nature that takes its course, and we surrender to its colossal waves and forgo any temptation to resist change. The wisdom of impermanence automatically takes root while we wait impatiently to emerge on the other side. I am learning that the trick is to endure with more presence than to anticipate the passing of the storm. The rich debris to fertilize the untamed and barren spaces of our consciousness is swirling at the center of the storm. So even when I am afraid of the shards damaging my eyes permanently, I am daring to keep my eyes open to gain a new perspective. That alone is the purpose of suffering. 

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Compassion Hurts, Artist: Sarah Meech, Source: Pinterest

Flowering Compassion

As a writer, I chose empathy as my second nature, the first being observation. I am aware that I cannot speak the truth unless I feel them with the intensity of hot ash on my skin. But compassion is a new paradigm I experience myself shifting into more frequently with current circumstances. The awakening of compassion amid this wildfire of suffering is like watching myself burn as I pray for the world to stop burning. It is to understand and internalize the molecular nature of suffering deeply enough to want to never inflict this on anyone else and suffer for anyone on whom it has been inflicted. In that manner, compassion is different from kindness. Kindness is a learned social behavior that stresses us to collectively outperform our capacity for doing good in this world. But compassion asks us to do nothing outwardly but sit silently with our pain and suffering until we realize that all human beings have gone through or shall go through similar experiences. It enables us to see that it is an imaginary barrier dam that separates the reservoir of our individual experiences from the river of our shared humanity. It helps us to understand that the dam was a construct that creates an illusion of separateness, it creates ‘I’ and ‘them’ when in reality there is only ‘we’. In the wake of compassion, we become a water droplet self-aware of the indistinguishable nature of the water in the reservoir and the river.  

Compassion hurts. When you feel connected to everything, you also feel responsible for everything. And you cannot turn away. Your destiny is bound with the destinies of others. You must either learn to carry the Universe or be crushed by it. You must grow strong enough to love the world, yet empty enough to sit down at the same table with its worst horrors.
- Andrews Boyd

Under the tectonic gravity of suffering, compassion flowers like a rebellious weed amid torpedoes. All the illusions of separateness shatter into a mosaic of collective experiences. It is ‘we’ who suffer, it is for ‘us’ that we heal. Handpick our sorrow, grief, and heartbreaks and create museums of memories stacked on shelves of life and remind ourselves what it felt like to be human and to have loved, lost, and suffered. In my last three decades of being human, ironically it is now that I am on the edge of such a personal crisis that I realize, there is nothing ‘personal’ about my crisis. My pain and suffering are universal amongst my species and many other emotionally intelligent species across Mother Earth. It reappears in myriad forms and influences varied interrelationships, but at its atomic level what constitutes suffering remains the same. It is only in the depravity of our holistic vision and spiritual blindness that we fluster on noticing the passage of sorrow through the canals of our consciousness. 

Suffering and pain are perennials of life, rarely acknowledged but constantly present, a place where all our shared human experiences confluence, and compassion grows on banks of life like watercress, a byproduct of our spiritual ecosystem to nourish our soul.