I’ve
been dealing with some pain lately, and, strangely, it’s making me see things
more clearly. It’s opened my eyes, I guess, after years of what seems like a
kind of blindness. I’m not actually blind, and I’ve had a relatively successful
life, and yet this painful situation is, in some ways, waking me up. It’s as if I’ve been
asleep in a dreamland where I was a completely separate entity surrounded by
countless enemies – disease, loss, disasters, failures, etc. – and I’m now
waking up to the fact that real life is something completely different. I see
now that I’m no more separate from everything around me than a drop of water is
separate from the ocean. My pain is not actually “mine”, but the pain of the
world – the pain of sorrowful parents, of suffering hospital patients, and of
all dying things, from antelopes to insects. The ocean of life and death rolls
and rushes and levels out, and I and all of us move with it in a secretly
graceful way. Pain is just the way the ocean of life looks at one moment, but
in the next it could look like love and light-heartedness. I was a hospital “patient”
a few days ago, and it’s a good
word, because it has helped me learn to be patient, to prepare myself to see more clearly
this new universe that pain is surprisingly spreading out before me.
