thoughts about disasters and suffering
life is suffering. -buddha
& filled with "unfairness." there is drought, plague, violent accident, drawn out painful struggles with disease and excruciating pain, neglected and abandoned elders, mass starvation and genocide,..........................................
there is also the internal pain - the eternal "Why" that we smash our heads against and cry out in the pain of the injustice of it all; there is the fear, doubt, sense of inadequacy, self-consciousness, comparison with others and always coming up short - or, worse - better; there is the struggle with conflicting desires, the terror of life's impermanence, the attachments and addictions that leave us so scared and so filled with despair when they come undone or the dreaded anticipation that one day, they will come undone,...........................
but there is also the beauty - of nature, of birth, of loving moments shared with others, of the endless beauty of the physical world, of the AWE at the processes of life and their seeming complexity and yet flawless execution so much of the time (for instance, the process of digestion, or childbirth), the capacity of the human heart to care, the expansive sense of peace that comes with surrender and the ability to just be really present in a moment,....................................
life is filled with "good" and "bad" things - our labels and discriminations help us on certain levels to carry out our lives (a salad is not a grapefruit) - but our judgments are our mental constructs - and they torture us deeply at points...
precisely because, at our core, in our hearts, we do care - deeply - about our own suffering as well as the suffering of others. when i see the people who have most effectively moved and changed the world - (and there are so many, but a small sample includes martin luther king, jr., mother theresa, jesus, dorothy day, gandhi...) - i notice two things:
(1) those
people also felt that sense of deep despair or helplessness and also felt a
deep desire to help - that we all feel...
(2) they probably suffered deeply from the despair and their awareness of the
unfairness, as we do and have, and yet they chose to propagate the opposite:
they chose to focus on the good that comes with the efforts of sharing love,
compassion, nonviolence, being present and caring with those who are suffering
the most rather than looking the other way or leaving them to suffer alone,
and the courage to walk directly into the places of deep inequity, imbalance,
and suffering, and not allow for it any longer, but to do something.
as counselors, or in any helping profession, our caring presence, our awareness of their suffering, our acceptance (Not indifference, but our ability to refrain from isolating or demeaning through judgment), and our choice to devote our energy to reshaping the darkness and walking straight through it - holding hands with the suffering - can make a huge difference to a suffering heart. and to the world.
even when
we feel so scared, and we have no clue what theories might work or not, or what
to do, our choice to remain present and to care will be the vital stepping stone
to making a difference.
© 2004 Heather Havey Neal