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This morning I woke up at 4:45 AM to catch an early train with my sister, Dorothy. I had been visiting the house in which I grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia because my tita (Tagalog for aunt) was recovering from a difficult surgery, while my family was processing an even more difficult diagnosis.
Maybe you’ve had someone in your family or your chosen family get sick. Maybe you’ve had the life you’re so carefully tending disrupted by the loss of a job or a relationship. Maybe you have learned the truth that sometimes the life you tend is disrupted by Life with a capital L.
COMPARING SUFFERING
I am not a fan of comparing kinds of suffering:
1) because I don’t center suffering in the plot of my meaning-making, and
2) because it’s a flattening and unhelpful form of hierarchy.
But lately, when I feel stretched, stressed, or sad, I think about how a person is a universe - and when even one person in your life is going through something harrowing, it profoundly impacts and upends the flow of time, resources, and energies.
And it makes me have a more felt sense of what it might be like to experience loss in every direction - the way that people in Gaza are experiencing loss of life, loss of love, loss of home, loss of food, loss of… hope. The way the history of empire has imprinted this kind of unfathomable loss into nearly everyone’s DNA.
Who knows why we are born into the families we are born into? Who knows why our souls choose this or that challenge or this or that culture or era to exist within?
We can create entire cultures trying to string together our best guesses and our innate knowing, and still likely only achieve a faint, blurry line. (I might argue the most harm is caused by people who pretend they know for certain about things that are unknowable.)
But this past weekend, what I came to understand while watching my mom prepare my aunt's and dad’s food on just four hours of sleep is that human beings live in constellations and now moments. The way my mom throws her body into every situation where she sees people hurting is something I directly inherited. Sometimes this creates beauty. Other times, it enables others to think they aren’t capable of handling their own lives and perpetuates learned helplessness. In emergencies, all of it gets blurrier and but other thing gets clear: we only ever experience one moment at a time.
THERE IS ONLY NOW
Most of the time that I am in a deep overwhelm or worry, I am getting ahead of myself - oftentimes trying to prevent something I experienced in the past from happening again.
This is a smart instinct. If I have information about a pain that is avoidable, why wouldn’t I use it to make a plan that benefits my future self? But sometimes this instinct causes us to dissociate from the present moment, and if I have learned anything in my 42 years alive on this earth, it is that Life is change, and change is not something we control with our minds.
The funny thing about future-tripping and trying to prevent pain is that usually when we are in the throes of pain avoidance, pain is already here. Pain from the past that we can’t hold. Pain from the now that’s sometimes too much to feel. Not always, but a lot of the time, pain is already in the room.
KINDS OF PAIN
Some forms of pain are an innate and inevitable part of existence. The pain of change. The pain of loss. We don’t live forever, not in these bodies anyway. The pain of growing apart. The pain of vulnerability. The pain that comes from working a muscle. The pain of growing up.
Then there are forms of pain that do not need to exist. The pain of abuse. The pain of oppression. The pain of isolation. The pain of turning our backs on the planet. The pain of displacing the human spirit. The pain of a culture that equates our worth with our work and our ability to consume. The pain of being lied to. The pain of poisoned food systems. The pain of disrespecting elders. The pain of being complicit in starving other people. The pain of being a settler or someone whose life has been settled upon.
We need to stop pretending that the answer to pain is to focus on symptoms, and instead,
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