Unbelievably your Pain is the Most Beautiful Thing in You

It’s a scary time. The darkness seems to be falling. And yet, I think, in a strange, improbable, way, that very darkness is bringing us closer together, by making it less scary for us to be naked. I’ll get to that.

They always told me I wasn’t, in every way that I was. Not a boy, not a man, not an economist, not a writer, nothing at all, and to make one another invisible, of course, is the nature of this game we have played for too long, so long now, that often, I think, this is all we know: to try to pull one another down, and in that way hope to stand up. But to truly stand one must only kneel.

To truly stand one must kneel. If I write, think, speak, and so on beautifully today, which of course I will deny, it isn’t because I became learned to be clever, or I survived my trials, or that I molded my fate with my bare hands, but for this reason and only reason. That at last, left with nothing left to be, having been erased, day by day, until I didn’t exist at all, I found all that did, and that was my pain.

Here is what it told me.

Your pain is the most beautiful thing in you. Not because it makes you stronger. That, you, like a beaten child, will somehow grow more virtuous every time the whip strikes your skin, crying and promising never again. The heart does not beat any stronger after it is beaten, it only stops, and at last, often, turns to goes into reverse, beats backwards, fills the body with poison, instead of blood. Nor is your pain the most beautiful thing in you because it is some kind an ethical awakening, that by somehow hurting you, you are suddenly somehow morally enlightened, experiencing that which you will never then inflict. Can we say that punishment and hurt have ever really improved a person?

It is much simpler, and yet infinitely more complicated. Your pain is the most beautiful thing in you because it teaches you what really is. Only in that place where you hurt, can you see the impossible fragility and glittering evanescence and beautiful loneliness in all things. Only there, where you hurt, can you know that every life shakes with grief, staggers in sorrow, for another, with another, and so the gift and the curse of the truth is this: that only from the pain of incompletion, smallness, imperfection that burns through all of existence can any being know laughter, love, truth, joy, grace at all.

Now you have stood naked before yourself, and seen that you are only a reflection of all things, and all things are only a reflection of you. And now that you have seen yourself naked, you can see all that is, naked, too, without going blind, and then and only then can the winter in you turn to summer, for you have always been longing to see what truly is, and so, at that precise instant, you are ready, at last, to love.

To love. To really love. Not from desire, which is only appetite. Nor from obligation, which is only duty. Nor from guilt, which is only fear. We call all those love, but they aren’t love. Love is only this: the joy that comes from a necessary freedom. And in that way, because you know that your pain, too, is only the ache of longing that suffuses all things, so your pain teaches you, in this way, that all the things you can hold must be held, as furiously, gently, desperately close as you can, in these few moments of breath that you have. How close can you hold anything when you are not naked?

These few short moments of breath. That is all we are, you and I. Not just little lost and lonely things, but less than that still: little lost and lonely things, who break apart in barely an instant. And yet, when you hold your pain, then you hold fire and midnight, earth and sky, wind and rain, right there, in your broken heart, in every moment, with gratitude, even for the way that they ache, which is just the way that you ache, too. Then the whole universe around you is not a dead thing anymore. It is alive, at last, because, first, you are. Only when you are naked can you really feel the warmth on your skin.

So. We often say that you need to “channel” or “use” your pain, but that is not true at all. There is only this. To try, and yet fail, to find the right way to express, name, say, know your pain. Whether it is the right words, or the right ideas. None of that matters. It only matters that you are giving your pain, not even to me, or the world, but only to you, even though your hands shake, and your eyes flutter. To give your pain to you is also to have already given it to the world. How can that be?

My pain is not your pain, and yet, nothing that is truly shared, freely given, and freely received, is ever ugly. Have you ever thought about that? Anything you give and that I receive with gratitude is suddenly as beautiful as the first day of spring, even when it is broken or shattered or bent or ruined, all the more. Never is that more true than for the human heart itself. When you are naked, what is there left to fear? Then you are free, at last, and in that way, to give your pain to yourself is to have already given it to the world, for you have already given more than the world to yourself. You have stood naked, at last, and learned that is the only way to hold anything in this life, as close as it desperately longs to be held, as close as you furiously yearn to hold the stars themselves.

I said: we are coming closer together, and that is the strange upside of this dark age. We are learning, every day, to share our pain. Have you noticed? We are being a little more honest about the truth of us. To really share the ways in which we have been hurt, and wounded, and scarred, at last, having hid them from each other too long, playing the vicious game of trying to turn the next person’s existence into nonexistence and so greedily exist more ourselves a little more that way. Ah, but then what are we existing for? And so. Should we stop playing that game, then let the darkness fall. It’s easier to be naked in the dark. And under the falling stars is more than enough light by which to see what we have always been, and laugh with gratitude, even as the fire turns us to dust.www.lastdon.org