I love peaceful days. I love blue skies and birds chirping and spare moments when I am able to draw a breath, and laughter and gest and nice walks and no phone calls to wake me up at night. And things falling into place. And as much as I wish this were not the case, these are moments of pause, of remembering to be grateful, of feeling my heart swell. Seldom of learning.
As much as I dislike and sometimes even fear it, I learn and grow so much more (if not only) in times of pain. It doesn’t feel like it in the moment but retrospectively I realize I am a different person, changed for the better. Most times.
The other day, as I was talking to a colleague, he shared something absolutely horrible that had happened to him. In the blink of an eye my entire perspective of this person who was able to sit in front of me, smile, share, be positive, most probably not in spite of what had happened to him but because of it, changed. I saw him with different eyes. Better to say I saw him through a different filter. And I started to wonder what that actually meant. What was it about my newly acquired knowledge of him having experienced unimaginable pain that completely shifted my perception of him as well as the way we interact?
I don’t presume for a second that my pain is greater or even equal to those around me. It is still mine, it is the one I learn from. Reflecting on my sudden change of perspective towards the person in front of me I realized that I have great respect for people who have gone through painful experiences and came out on the other side able to go on. Albeit different but still able to go on. I realized that I equate this to a superpower: these humans, more or less willingly, allowed pain to travel their being, lived their humanness to the core and continued to be here with us engaging and even patiently allowing others to be human. Outstanding!
When I reflect on my experiences of pain I realize that, regardless of how much I resent this, there have been no greater teachers in my life.
The first beloved person Iost was my grandma and I remember that as the very first moment when I was able to hear some of life’s very important questions: what if this is all you get? would you say your life was actually well lived? And the answers I could not hide from any longer completely changed my life. Because pain, intense pain, disables heart firewalls at least for a while and what we feel is the raw, unadulterated truth. And regardless of what we say or do, we cannot hide it from ourselves.
When my brother died, sitting on a bench next to his coffin, during the vigil, a new set of filters appeared in my heart for the people who actually care: were they there? So many texted and spoke about being there but when I looked around the room, where I needed them to be, few were. And pain helped me understand that it is not the numbers. It’s the few. And that it is not the words but the actions that matter.
It is precisely through the pain of nothingness in my deep depression and the insurmountable fear of my too many to count anxiety attacks that I learned the value of breathing moments, the importance of my self care and most of all that we all fight battles others know nothing about.
Any ounce of compassion I may have today is due to my struggles with infertility, miscarriages, mental illness, to my visiting loved ones in jail, trying to help people I deeply cared for escape the peril drugs, to being bullied and bullying others, to being deeply lonely and unloved, to being ignored and hurt and to ignoring and leaving behind, to faking life until it was no longer possible to do so. All painful experiences and great teachers, all at the same time. And only in retrospect.
I never wish for pain. Regardless of my realization that it is pain that teaches me, not my success or my joy or my moments of respite. I never embrace it when it arrives, for it always does. I always welcome it reluctantly, screaming and kicking at times, I always consider myself unfairly treated by pain. And it is only when I am out of it enough to wonder what that experience was here to teach me that growth is almost palpable and things fall into place in my mind and in my heart. What a blessing in disguise!
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