“If you are paying attention to the world you see a lot of pain.” — Mary Pipher
I came across Mary Pipher’s words quoted above while reading her book, “Letters to a Young Therapist.” I felt compelled to share those words with the wife because they struck a chord with me with how I was feeling after a day of counseling people, as well as just the particular noise being generated by the world that was ringing and running around in my head.
She responded in an unexpected way, as I was predicting she would just agree with me and recognize possibly feeling the same.
“But there’s a lot of good in the world too,” she said.
Huh. That was surprisingly and staggeringly unexpected.
And she was right, there is a lot of good.
However, I had been focused on the pain of the moment, looking at the distressed conditions of a very complex and confusing world, as well as the interpersonal relationships that had taken place during my day. I inwardly was feeling both damaged and vulnerable while both relating and gravitating to all my negative emotions. The wife’s simple, yet alternative viewpoint, was just what I needed to help me find a new and alternative understanding about what I was feeling, how what I was feeling would eventually make me stronger and more resilient, and guide me to feel encouraged to undertake to live a more meaningful life, despite seeing so much pain.
The wife’s viewpoint rightly destabilized me for a moment, but that was the thing I needed most at that very time. Destabilization offered me to recognize the normal anxiety of being a human being in a raucous and often crazy-seeming society, to be able to use the comparison of my thoughts and feelings (which are most often not true when challenged) to better understand the suffering that surrounded me and how I could move through it without being overwhelmed by it.
It helps me to remind myself that life, which can be compared to suffering (In the Buddhist tradition where the First Noble Truth is that “Life is suffering”), is like waves of the ocean that come in and touch us as we move along in life, sometimes gently washing barely over our feet, other times breaking with hostile force against our whole being and knocking us flat to the sand. But, those waves of suffering and hardship always leave what they have touched to return to the vast ocean of the world leaving us the opportunity to grow.
Being touched by suffering is normal, but it is our choice as to how we suffer from its touch.
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