It’s true there’s a good reason for pain, and for suffering. They do push us to grow, force us to build new structures in that endless spiral of evolution. It’s impossible to avoid pain and suffering in a life, in any life, even that of the richest, most beautiful, most famous. Everyone suffers. Everyone dies. You often see rich, celebrated people absolutely refuse to accept this basic fact. I think of the billionaires anxiously invading the lives of others in their quest to be more powerful and, perhaps (hah!) achieve immortality. I think of someone like JK Rowling, who, you would think, has gotten everything she could possibly want in this life: creative success, riches, fame. And yet she spends an awful lot of time trying to stop trans people from having life the way they want it. I think, whenever I read about another, to me, bizarre post from her, that she’s wasting time that could have been spent in enjoyment of her life. Then I wonder why. The only conclusion I can come to is that she must have thought achieving riches and fame would lead her, inevitably, to a land of bliss, where suffering and pain were not. Yet, strangely, they didn’t. So she’s angry, lashes out—it must be someone else’s fault, after all. There must be a way to avoid all this pain.
There isn’t. We all get old (if we’re lucky). We all will experience weakness, diminution of power (if we’re lucky). We’ll all die (lucky or not, as the case may be). Yes, Billionaires, I regret to inform you that this is an immutable fact. We will all die. We will all suffer. We will all experience pain.
But there is a difference, and a big one, between inevitable and excess suffering. Excess suffering is when you try to outsource your pain onto someone else. Inevitably, you’ve caused them more pain, they who are innocent, of this at least. What’s worse, you have not managed to rid yourself of one bit of your own pain. Not even of discomfort. In fact, it’s far worse than if you’d just kept your pain to yourself. You feel, even if you don’t know it, the pain of having hurt others. Because there are no ‘others’. We’re all in this together. Pain for one is pain for all. Bomb a school and kill the children there, and believe you me, you’re going to feel it, one way or another, whether you recognize the source of it or not.
The late Tamra Lucid, longtime contributor to EAP: The Magazine, knew this well. After she died, her husband, Ronnie Pontiac, found the last piece she’d written, a farewell to undeserved pain, the kind inflicted on those weaker by the more powerful. Her Name Rhymed with Pamela. It’s a story of one young woman who is, alas, not the only one right now who’s been unjustly ground down. Tortured into the dust by those in power, those trying to outsource their fears of the ‘other’. Fears of their own weakness, and their own deaths. I think about people I know, family, friends, neighbors, who, fearing their own darkness, push these off onto unknown ‘illegals’. People they’ve turned into abstractions, actual human beings they’ve robbed, in their secret terror, of humanity. Anyone who does this is suffering terribly, trying to rid themselves of pain by pawning it off on someone else, preferably someone far away. Deport them! Bomb them! Kill them! Is there no one who will rid me of this turbulent priest?
There isn’t. The pain is inside, not outside. And you’ll feel it if you read Tamra’s piece. Take care of yourself before you do. Sit down in a quiet place, with a warm drink at hand, in a safe spot where, for the moment, you fear no evil. And then read. If you’re like me, you’ll hardly be able to finish. Certainly without tears. But finish. Cry. Feel your own pain; refuse to send it to someone else to carry.
Then, as the poets promise, it might transform into something that will help to ease the pain of others, if not eliminate it, rather than needlessly increasing it. Instead of spreading it around, we can do what EAP is meant to support: Embrace our communities. Mourn together. When we can, celebrate the world in all its terrifying glory, its awful suffering, its moments of piercing joy. And go on. That’s what we’re doing here. We’re experiencing it together. Then we’re going on.
We can’t go on. We must go on.
In going on, we welcome poet Harvey Lillywhite’s new book, I Ask This Favor, as Any Person Might. And a poem from that collection in this issue: “As God Gargles Oceans.” Let’s join in from our small bit of land.
Welcome back.