Hardship IS the story. It’s not pessimism. It’s not bad news. It’s not a negative outlook or a bad attitude. Everything in this life ends, so don’t get too attached. For those experiencing extreme hardship, the revelation of this fact of life comes as a great relief.
Even the Bhagavad Gita calls our world a “world of miseries.” Our world is a world being consumed by time, and when it’s over there will be nothing left of it. For much of our lives, this can scare the shit out of us. But then one day something inside of us wakes up, and we realize that it was hardship alone which forced us to wake up, and we no longer turn away from hardship. We no longer pray for others’ hardships to end. We see the great gift of it.
Some even refer to hardship as Grace. My favorite speech was an impromptu speech by Bobby Kennedy where he quoted his favorite poet, the Ancient Greek playwright, Aeschylus, while standing on the back of a truck in Indianapolis the night Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. died. "In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."
Every rehab facility in the country is filled up with powerful, rich, white men who sought happiness in power, money, and drink, whose children no longer speak with them, whose many ex-wives have been legally obliged to much of their riches, whose lives have no substance, no fulfillment, no happiness.
For every helicopter parent who hides his and her daughter and son from hardship, there is a deeply confused young woman and man forced to reconcile with the reality of life on Earth. When confronted with this reality with such blunt force, we seek happiness in money, in power, in sex, in drugs, in food, in pity, and the list goes on. Do we ever find happiness?
The story of Gautama the Buddha is the story of the archetypal helicopter parent. His father, a king, hid Gautama from the reality of the world until he was a young man, when Gautama saw a man die on the streets, and spent the rest of his life in pursuit of spiritual wisdom, acknowledging the great value in suffering. There’s a word for this moment in a play when a character is confronted with the awful truth. It’s called anagnorisis.
Every writer knows every book, every film, every poem, every song must have an arc. Every story has an arc, yet we forget this in our own lives. We’re told that we’re all supposed to be happy, seek happiness, avoid hardship. It’s endowed by our creator, in our Declaration, the pursuit of happiness.
William Blake, one of my artistic and visionary heroes, wrote extensively about his own hero, the poet John Milton. Blake notes Milton’s elaborate descriptions of hell, fire, pain, in Milton’s most celebrated poem, Paradise Lost. Blake points out how Milton’s visions of paradise are much more mundane. This is true in Dante’s Divine Comedy as well. Heaven is much more difficult to imagine then hell is.
Most of us can’t even imagine what true fulfillment would look like, what it would feel like to be free from suffering, free from hardship. Even a great painting must begin with some darker shade in order to juxtapose the lighter colors. Happy songs, as well, often sound contrived, redundant, mundane. There’s no story in happiness becoming happiness. There’s no arc. The minor six must “reveal” the one major chord, must “resolve” the conflict.
Without resistance, every note would travel at the same speed, making the same sound. Without resistance, every light wave would travel at the same speed, making the same color. Without resistance, every story would begin and end exactly the same way.
The operable metaphor which ties this great lineage of aforementioned poets together is those three words which begin that Aeschylus quote: “In our sleep…” Whether it be Dante’s journey through the 9 layers of hell, Milton in his Paradise Lost, or Blake in his Marriage of Heaven and Hell, when we stop seeking happiness in the material world and begin to acknowledge our suffering, we begin to awaken.
Some of us may find ourselves at the ninth layer of hell before we acknowledge it, but this is the first of Gautama Buddha’s Four Noble Truths: life is suffering. It’s not pessimism. It’s not bad news. It’s not a negative outlook or a bad attitude. It’s a fact of life. There’s no wisdom without the awful grace of God.