I received and accepted a job offer this week - precisely 40 weeks after I was laid off from my last place of employment. 40 weeks… also happens to be the gestational period for a human being - the full term of a pregnancy, from conception to birth.
In many ways, the last 40 weeks has been exactly that - a birthing process, or should I say, a rebirthing. A long, dark and oftentimes challenging cocooning phase precipitated by a job loss but culminating in so much more. The dying of an old self and the birth of a new.
I watched my life crumble, my relationships crumble and even my mind crumble. I questioned and doubted myself more in the past year than I did in the previous ten combined. There were many days when I truly believed I would never emerge from such darkness. The hollowness I felt in certain moments was disconcerting - where nothing felt worth living for anymore, not even the cheerful faces of my own children - where I wanted nothing more than an end to it all.
Spiritual crises, it is said, are gateways - rites of passage one must pass through in order to shed an old skin, or self, in order to emerge into a new one. However, despite knowing this and having gone through it several times before, being cast into the midst of it felt unnerving nonetheless. I compare it to being lost in the middle of a dense fog with no visibility beyond the end of your nose. Where events can only be interpreted by the sounds they make and the rest is left up to the imagination to piece together as to what they might represent.
And the mind becomes a duplicitous companion - a wise confidant in one moment and a shameless quisling the next. More and more one begins to realize that nothing one perceives is reliable, perhaps only the breath, and even that only relatively so.
Fog outside, fog within - and, in the midst, a person allegedly attempting to build a life. Perhaps that is what it feels like to be a child in the womb. Blind, and at the mercy of those benevolent or hostile circumstances, entirely outside one’s control, that govern how we will experience each moment.
The first trimester of this gestational phase was tough, the second was hell, yet the third was calmer, gentler. For, even as my external circumstances became more challenging, my inner experience began to evolve in an inversely proportional manner. The harder life became the calmer I felt, the more dire my circumstances the gentler and more tempered my responses to them.
I noticed a kindness expressing itself through me that I had forgotten I was capable of. This was a quality that I had displayed as a very young child but had likely learned to suppress as I grew older. A deep sense of humility around my own limitations as a person coupled with a profound appreciation for other people and the ways in which they contribute to my life began to gradually displace the brashness and arrogance I have long displayed both in my personal life and in my writing.
I came across this quote recently that I resonated with deeply, because I felt it was representative of just what I had experienced over this period:
“The kindest people are not born that way, they are made. They are the ones that have experienced so much at the hands of life, they are the ones who have dug themselves out of the dark, who have fought to turn every loss into a lesson.
The kindest people do not just exist – they choose to soften where circumstance has tried to harden them, they choose to believe in goodness, because they have seen firsthand why compassion is so necessary.
They have seen firsthand why tenderness is so important in this world.”
~Bianca Sparacino, A Gentle Reminder
Seeing firsthand why compassion is so necessary…
This is, for me, one of the greatest spiritual lessons one can learn.
You see, it is quite easy and tempting to get caught up in the philosophies, the mystical experiences of bliss, the resting as the impersonal witness and the realization of great existential insights into the nature of self and reality. Life is a dream and we, the universal dreamer, are lost in dreams of separation from one another, our stories, our narratives … and all that is well and good.
Yet, despite all of that - there is still a life to live. And that life comprises of people, animals and other beings of nature - beings that suffer and cause suffering. And we can witness suffering from our detached vantage points and wax eloquent on this fundamental fact of life all we want but … when that suffering hits home - when it affects us personally, when it lays our lives in shambles and eats out our insides like an invisible termite infestation - that is when we are forced to confront just how painful life can be.
And this realization can cause us to recoil - to stiffen, to harden, to armor and protect ourselves against the vicissitudes of fate by building layers of psychological buffer through various forms of spiritual bypass…
OR we can allow life to soften us - which is never easy because it requires us to willfully submit to the hammering of painful circumstances much like a butcher tenderizes a piece of meat with a mallet.
The beauty of taking the second path is that it awakens compassion for others because we have seen firsthand just how ruthless life can be.
This is why some of the elderly people I have met exhibit a genuine kindness and seem without much ego and pretense. They have been through the ringer and have chosen to allow life to soften them. On the other hand, there are many who choose the path of rigidity instead and age makes them bitter, resentful, mean and filled with regrets.
This is one of those great ironies of life that it is the hard path that softens a soul. Yet, in such softening our greatest spiritual strengths are unlocked: patience, forbearance, wisdom, equanimity, gratitude, kindness and a feeling of kinship with all beings.
I look back now on the last 40 weeks and it feels like 40 years. An entire lifetime has transpired in this brief span of time.
One has died. Another has been born. A new circle has begun…
(photo: self-portrait standing by the noren (fabric divider) in front of my zendo. The kanji character printed is kokoro - meaning “heart” in Japanese.)
Happy "birthday" Shiv... Your posting reminded me of a glorious poem:
"I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?"
~ Mary Oliver, The Summer Day
dear shiv,
congrats on the new job!
and thank you so much for this beautiful quote from Bianca Sparacino:
“The kindest people are not born that way, they are made. They are the ones that have experienced so much at the hands of life, they are the ones who have dug themselves out of the dark, who have fought to turn every loss into a lesson.
The kindest people do not just exist – they choose to soften where circumstance has tried to harden them, they choose to believe in goodness, because they have seen firsthand why compassion is so necessary.
They have seen firsthand why tenderness is so important in this world.”
much love,
myq