Why shouldn’t it hurt?

We are all finding, all the time, a kind of core. We hope it’s resilient. And if it isn’t resilient – well, equally, I’m always saying to people that strength is an overrated virtue. There’s nothing wrong with saying, ‘I can’t. I really can’t cope with this,’ and turning to whoever or whatever it takes to get through. Although I suppose that resilience and strength are not quite the same. Resilience is being able to get up again, and strength is probably standing there while the rushing brook hurls around you – and there, the point is, you don’t have to get into it. You don’t have to be there. You don’t have to just survive. But I suppose for me – and this is just personal to me, only advice and not a tenet, ‘This is how it should be’ – there is something about that gathering of yourself every day, that regathering, too, which sets you up for the day to come.

Janet Ellis, in conversation with Andrew Copson, in What I Believe: Humanist ideas and philosophies to live by

There is an old Buddhist truism, often quoted and often misattributed, to the effect that “pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional”. It can sound unfeeling – smug, almost – to one in the midst of real distress; but I have found, strangely, that it is true in the end. We are frail, impermanent, like all living things. Of course change and decay happen to us, and of course they hurt. The problem arises when we are either gripped by the longing for the pain to stop, or paralysed with fear of the reasons for the pain, of its possible outcome. The answer to this is practice.

Practice? How can that work? Surely we cannot sit calmly in meditation when our hearts are broken, when pain knots our guts, or fear steals our breath. Almost certainly we can’t; probably the best we can do at times like this is remember – and often enough that in itself will be too much. How often do we expect from ourselves things the human frame cannot sustain?

Practice, hour after hour, day after day, when all is well, or when there are only little irritations, little twinges: that is the practice that will stay with us when things fall apart, and the centre cannot hold; when all we had hoped for has failed, and the cliff edge slips from under our feet. It is then that we realise that as Janet Ellis says, “You don’t have to just survive.” That, beyond belief almost, “[t]his is how it should be.” That, weirdly, it’s all right. Why not? Why not me? Why shouldn’t something dreadful happen to me? Who else should it happen to, for goodness’ sake?

What practice does, I think, is allow us to accept. Finally, radically (in the original sense of “at the root”) accept what is, even if what is happens to be terrible. Pain, loss, grief: these are inevitable parts of being alive, as is the fear of them. The “suffering”, in the sense of the old Buddhist saying, comes from thinking they shouldn’t be – from trying to make them stop. One can’t, of course: they stop when it is time for them to stop, and not before. Certainly not to order. And it is this realisation that brings the suffering, the craving for it to be otherwise, to an end. The pain may well be as bad as it ever was; but it’s okay. Really. It’s okay. It is part of what is; what, in some unfathomable way, is “how it should be”. The wind-torn wave is just a part of the river, just water, still flowing.

#AndrewCopson #contemplative #JanetEllis #practice #suffering #surrender

Invisible

For a long time, since in fact before I formed any kind of regular contemplative practice, and was still very unsure of the relations between philosophy, spirituality and religion, I have been drawn towards being somehow invisible among my peers. And of course, over the years, my contemplative practice has only deepened that longing. The effects of practice on life are sometimes subtle, and they are not always obviously connected to any subjective experience on the part of the one practising. All this tends inevitably towards the eremitic.

As I have said here before, I think perhaps we should recognise the Einzelgänger or Einzelgängerin as a distinct personality type in themselves. I don’t mean by this a literal loner, nor a hermit in either the religious or the colloquial sense; but a contemplative who finds that they are temperamentally unsuited either for formal membership of some church or meeting, or for the particular relationship of personal discipleship; perhaps even for the commitment of active membership in some political or social movement. This may seem austere to a detached observer, but it doesn’t feel that way from the inside, as it were. It may even be a necessary discipline.

Oddly enough, I can’t seem to detach this eremitical instinct from an acute sense of the moral necessity of equality. It has never made sense to me that – often in religious just as much as in political contexts – some people were disadvantaged, often for reasons over which they had no control themselves, compared to their fellows. That the fact that someone was a woman, or Black, or poor, or gay, would have anything to do with the opportunities life presented has increasingly seemed to me morally obscene. In an interview with Andrew Copson, published in the recent What I Believe collection from Humanists UK, Kate Pickett says,

I’m always quite impressed by the way Quakers talk about it, they have a testimony towards equality. I think that’s the way I think about it as well. People get a bit bent out of shape when they talk about equality, saying things like: ‘We can never have equality, and can never truly be equal, it’s utopian.’ And to a certain extent, that’s true, but we can have more equality. And we can work towards reducing inequality gaps in various aspects. So we can think about working towards reducing gender pay gaps, for example, and that’s improving equality. And even if we don’t get to exactly the same level, then we’re still making progress.

Organisations – even sometimes the Quakers! – have inequality gaps. It’s inevitable: the mere organising of people into structural groupings has this effect. Maybe the radical inward equality imposed by the contemplative life cries out against even this; perhaps that is why the longing for stillness and solitude seems somehow to include a longing for equality?

Certainly this instinct – and it is an instinct far more than a decision – for Einsamkeit feels like a healthy instinct for a wholeness, a completion, that I have far too often neglected. The inwardly eremitic life doesn’t, it appears, have necessarily to involve physical isolation or any experiment in extreme living: it is a solitude of the heart, a calling to a necessary quiet.

#AndrewCopson #contemplative #eremitism #KatePickett #practice #solitude