The Meaning of Difficult

The car radio was broadcasting an interview with Dr. William Kaelin, a Harvard guy who’d just been awarded this year’s Noble Prize in Medicine.  The news raised no eyebrows among those familiar with leading edge medical research.  In recent years Dr. Kaelin had received several other forms of recognition that are often precursors to the Nobel.  As he relayed his feelings, Bill Kaelin spoke of how he and his wife had such fun fantasizing how they might respond should this award ever come his way: what they might do with the money, what they would wear to the ceremony, that sort of thing.  His wife, Carolyn, was an esteemed physician and researcher herself, a professional peer you might say, in addition to being Kaelin’s best friend and mother of their two children.  So getting the call from the Nobel folks that Monday morning was a bittersweet experience for him because, four years earlier, Carolyn died of a brain tumor.  The biggest revelation this story gave me was that I am able to sob uncontrollably and drive a stick shift at the same time.  Well, once anyway.

In the wake of my beloved’s suicide, it’s the rare day I don’t weep provoked by who knows what.  Not tears of anguish, surprisingly, but rather awe at the presence of such depth of life.  The ocean of experience in which I swim (or, better, drift) is fulfilling in ways unimagined my soul’s longing since birth to love everything.  Arriving like a storm of grand pianos falling from heaven, “everything” now includes the void in which I live.  It’s a first to be so exhausted I sometimes wonder if I’m dying.  Planning beyond today is like trying to be two places at once.  Nothing is familiar, even the relentless devotion of my two goldens.  There’s a unique nausea that comes with having to finish this essay without the benefit of my beloved saying, “I like it” or “I have a thought,” as she did before everything else I’ve written for decades was offered to the world.  

Yet, underlying it all is the subtle joy of expansion. 

I am learning from those sweet souls who are convinced I must be having a difficult time, their connotation of “difficult” being unwanted, undesirable, unlikable.  I don’t find that true for me.  There’s difficulty alright.  But it’s the difficulty we all face when attempting to respond with integrity to something, to do our best at something: parenting, poker, healing humankind’s addiction to racism, creating architecture that enlivens the heart, deer hunting, running long distances without tiring, telling the truth.  I can’t think of anything that isn’t difficult if we want to be accomplished at it, to plumb what it has to teach us about ourselves.  

My rocky road suggests that at the heart of difficulty is the fear of pain.  The pain of losing a familiar.  A loss that is the price of the new.  The death of who we were yesterday that sets the table for how fully we can celebrate who we are today.  That fear––fueled by habit, ignorance, inexperience and a lack of support in managing it––can lead us to run from pain rather than embrace it, feel it, free it, and therefore grow by learning from it.  No wonder those triggers of enormous pain (such as death) can be judged as undesirable, unwanted, unlikable.  

Any growth I’ve made in responding with loving kindness to the hand I’m dealt is linked directly to my admittedly messy practice of freeing both the fear of pain and pain itself.

Today, from time to time I ask, “What do I wish were different?”  The answer is always, “Nothing.”

I’m not here to have opinions about how things ought to go, only about my intention for how I meet each moment, and what each moment represents.  You wouldn’t necessarily know this from my behavior, but I believe every moment represents a sacred opportunity to both make room for and let go of whatever will serve my heart’s deepest call: to love more and better.

Further, I’m aware that my judgments about anything are entirely self-created, based upon how I define reality.  Today, for instance, I find grieving to be a process of freeing a life that no longer exists, and making room for the life that is both present and emerging.  Maybe tomorrow I’ll have a different definition.

Is sadness part of the process?  I would say so if sadness is the feeling of a loss of an intensely enriching and sacred part of me, a loss that I feel ever more deeply is absolute, irretrievable.  In that sense I definitely feel sadness.  But is it something I dislike?  Is it unwanted or undesirable?  No.  Would I choose it?  On one level, no.  From a larger perspective I have chosen it as a consequence of karma––the fruits of past actions that draw to me all that needs to be embraced to live in conscious union with God.  

So I guess I asked for this.  Or better, I deserve it.  I’ve somehow earned the privilege of having to make my way with the help of what appears to be unprecedented adversity.  It’s gratifying that the Buddhist sage Padmasambava counseled that adverse conditions are a practitioner’s true wealth.  That I’ve been hit upside the heart with a two-by-four makes me a wealthy man.

And part of that wealth comes from the heartache that this and every word I write until my guardian angels say “Enough already” is an orphan, unable to be elevated by the wise and tender eye of my beloved.