By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)
Few things in our culture are more wounding than the concept of healing — as if the pains and losses that we suffer are an illness, a malfunction of the psyche to be cut out like a tumor, rather than a natural function of being alive, of feeling life deeply and living it fully. All our sorrows have been wasted if we have not learned to suffer and to be surprised by the door at the end of our suffering, on the other wide of which is simply the world, which keeps on worlding. It is not healing that allows us to go on but integration, allowing our losses to live right alongside our joys for either to mean something, to jolt us from the stupor of indifference that is worse than death.
Nick Cave
No one has articulated this more plainly and profoundly than Nick Cave in reflecting on the anniversary of his young son’s death:
It is early morning in Nîmes. I am waiting for coffee while looking out of the window of the small hotel where Susie and I are staying. The square below is waking up. There are a few cars, a woman walking a dog, a kid on a scooter, an old man smoking on a bench. Today, Susie and I plan to walk around the town for a bit, maybe visit a church, and maybe find the river that people say runs clean and cold. Later, I’ll play a show at the amphitheatre.
I am not saying this just to offer comfort to those who have lost someone, as if to say that in time everything will be all right, because even though it will be, it won’t be. Rather, I am acknowledging that although this day marks the 11th anniversary of the worst day of our lives, it is also a beautiful day, with the sun shining, a child playing, a man enjoying a cigarette, a world quietly waking and moving forward.
This may be the most discomposing aspect of loss — how impartially the world goes on when your world has been shattered. And yet the great paradox is that it is precisely by surrendering to this ongoingness, both dispassionate and rife with wonder, that we are returned to life.
Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days.. Available as a print and more.
Nick paints a gorgeous still life of this bright ongoingness:
These feelings of loss drift through our bodies like ghosts. They settle in our cells, in our blood, gathering around days like this like weather patterns, shaping us in ways we cannot understand. It is a sad day. I can see it in my wife’s eyes. But it is an ordinary day too, a beautiful day. The best day. Susie is already at the window, pulling back the curtain, looking out over the town, the sun shining on her face.
Couple with Hemingway’s moving letter of consolation to a couple who lost their son, then revisit Nick Cave on how to use your suffering, the two pillars of a meaningful life, and the antidote to our existential helplessness.
The world… is indeed a strange and deeply mysterious place, forever changing and remaking itself anew. But this is not a novel condition, our world hasn’t only recently become bizarre and temporary, it has been so ever since its inception, and it will continue to be such until its end — mystifying and forever in a state of flux.
We’re often led to believe that getting older is in itself somehow a betrayal of our idealistic younger self, but sometimes I think it might be the other way around. Maybe the younger self finds it difficult to inhabit its true potential because it has no idea what that potential is. It is a kind of unformed thing running scared most of the time, frantically trying to build its sense of self — This is me! Here I am! — in any way that it can. But then time and life come along, and smash that sense of self into a million pieces.