I was talking with one of my goddaughters recently (how blessed I am to say that!), and she asked, “How should we deal with the inevitable pain of life?”
Of course, isn’t that one of the most essential, persistent questions?
No one has been able to answer this for me better than the poet and essayist Ross Gay. I’ve been doing a deep dive with his writings because he was scheduled to come to Bellingham for a reading. Sadly, that’s been cancelled, but I still feel like I’ve had some great time with him lately.
I give to you a few paragraphs from his essay Joy is Such a Human Madness, from his must-have The Book of Delights:
—
Among the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard anyone say came from my student Bethany, talking about her pedagogical aspirations or ethos, how she wanted to be a as a teacher, and what she wanted her classrooms to be: “What if we joined our wildernesses together?” Sit with that for a minute. That the body, the life, might carry a wilderness, an unexplored territory, and that yours and mine might somewhere, somehow, meet. Might, even, join.
And what if the wilderness—perhaps the densest wild in there—thickets, bogs, swamps, uncrossable ravines and rivers (have I made the metaphor clear?)—is our sorrow?…It astonishes me sometimes—no, often—how every person I get to know—everyone, regardless of everything, by which I mean everything—lives with some profound personal sorrow. Brother addicted. Mother murdered. Dad died in surgery. Rejected by their family. Cancer came back. Evicted. Fetus not okay. Everyone, regardless, always, of everything. Not to mention the existential sorry we might all be afflicted with, which is that we, and what we love, will soon be annihilated. Which sounds more dramatic than it might. Let me just say dead. Is this, sorrow, of which our impending being no more might be the foundation, the great wilderness?
Is sorrow the true wild?
And if it is—and if we join them—your wild to mine—what’s that?
For joining, too, is a kind of annihilation.
What if we joined our sorrows, I’m saying.
I’m saying, what if that is joy?
—
Yes, joy might also be a perfect sunset or the trip of a lifetime. It might be falling in love or publishing a book. But what about all the times in-between? If we are brave, if we open ourselves to one another, joy can also, miraculously, be our shared sorrow.
That’s my best response to my goddaughter and to you, wherever life finds you as you are reading this. May you see your joys and sorrows for what they are, may you have or find others in their wilderness and join your wilderness to theirs.