The Cure, Episode 86
What's the cost of trying to 'get over' grief, sorrow and pain? Is there another way? Can we perhaps find a way to welcome in ourselves what we'd otherwise try to push away, and in doing so learn to welcome other people more fully too?
Here’s Episode 86 of Turning Towards Life, a weekly live 30 minute conversation hosted by Thirdspace in which Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn dive deep into big questions of human living. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. We’re also on YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google and Spotify
In this conversation we explore together what happens when we try to make certain kinds of experience (grief, sorrow, fear, pain) unwelcome in our lives, and in doing so, try to 'get over' them instead of including them. We talk about the limits of our power in controlling the world - both the outer world of events and the inner world of experiences - and about the cost to us of pushing away that which, given time, patience and kindness, could act to open us ever more deeply to the world. And we see how much it's possible for human beings to help one another with this - how when we act as a welcome to what's 'other' in ourselves we can also help be a welcome to other people. In times when there are many forces trying to push us apart from ourselves and one another, we consider this to be a necessary, dignified and healing stand to take in the world.
The Cure
We think we get over things.
We don’t get over things.
Or say, we get over the measles
but not a broken heart.
We need to make that distinction.
The things that become part of our experience
never become less a part of our experience.
How can I say it?
The way to “get over” a life is to die.
Short of that, you move with it,
let the pain be pain,
not in the hope that it will vanish
but in the faith that it will fit in,
find its place in the shape of things
and be then not any less pain but true to form.
Because anything natural has an inherent shape
and will flow towards it.
And a life is as natural as a leaf.
That’s what we’re looking for:
not the end of a thing but the shape of it.
Wisdom is seeing the shape of your life
without obliterating (getting over) a single
instant of it.
– Albert Huffstickler
Photo by Samuel Zeller on Unsplash