Source: Unsplash / Dmitry Schemelev
Life is strange and unpredictable. Everything is smooth sailing, and then it falls apart. Or everything is bearable until it’s not.
Fear and pain are always around the corner, and none of us is spared the suffering. It could be the angst of watching your child suffer and being unable to help or get through to them. It could be the daily agony of working in a toxic environment or the sudden panic of a health crisis or a breakup—Sometimes it can seem like we are the target of some sadistic plot. I’m pulled there often and know so well that feeling of being let down:
Universe, were you really intending to mock my dreams all along?
But here’s what I also know. The universe—all of life—is an intricate web of joy and suffering designed to ultimately help us in our spiritual growth. Because that’s how it grows in its own consciousness.
As William Blake wrote:
Joy & Woe are woven fine
A Clothing for the soul divine
Under every grief & pine
Runs a joy with silken twine
We cannot see joy when we’re in the midst of fear or pain because suffering has a way of drawing us inward into a deep downward spiral.
And so it takes intentional looking with love and appreciation—the two magic wands that turn rags into riches. If you’re living through a period of dark nights of the soul, despairingly searching for answers that may not be ready to be revealed, turn to the beauty that also exists alongside the pain.
Look at the bouquet of flowers on the lamppost outside your apartment window. Smile at the little child running late for school or the toddler on her tricycle with her ponytails flying in the wind…
And listen…there’s a bird chirping somewhere that you weren’t aware of until you were. Her song will remind you that life sings to us in every moment and invites us into its loving circle of being.
Such is life’s paradox, and when you’re present to all of it, you’ll find the strength to keep moving when everything in you wants you to stop.
Or to keep moving with grace when everything in you wants you to fight for what is lost or uncertain—a frenzied and desperate state that’ll get you nowhere.
Over time, you’ll find the answers that come only in the waiting, because the soul follows a different timeline. Or you’ll find meaning because sometimes there is no answer. There’s only the next step and then the next.
Such is spiritual growth, the courageous act of moving through the black-and-white lens of spiritual adolescence to the both-and reality of life in all its forms. One small step at a time, and not always forward, either.
It’s the slow and steady buckling and stretching of a caterpillar. Becoming a butterfly is the ultimate work of life that we’re all here to do.
