Hard Times Ahead // Variant Perception #37

Bad things happen in life. I think we know that. But, at the same time, nobody wants to believe they’ll happen to us. Our dream life never includes tragedies waiting behind each new milestone. However, I’m beginning to see that things in life that we most cherish and bring us the most joy create inevitable tragedy. 

Ben Shapiro sums up this phenomenon on Lex Fridman’s podcast in a way that stuck with me.

When most people are young, before they have their own family and children, they experience an emotional range of 0-10, where 0 is awful, and 10 is incredible.

Then, as life progresses, people create a life filled with more love, attachments, and meaning. The scale expands from -10 to 10. The range increased to negative ten because now our lives include people and things we love outside our control. And as we age, our life enters a phase where it becomes more probable that bad things happen to the people we love.

The next chapter can be marked by having children. That’s when the scale moves from -∞ to ∞. Having something you birthed and created expands your capacity for feeling joy, bliss, pain, and sorrow to infinite potential.

The lesson is this. The more we increase our opportunity to love, the more we increase our encounters with pain. Finding a partner, joining lives together, and beginning a family can be the ultimate journey of experiencing that full range of the highest highs and highest lows.

It’s dawning on me now how much I’m entering a period of life with infinite scale on both sides. It doesn’t feel scary. It feels normal. It feels natural, like a pivotal verse in a song that I love. 

This phenomenon is not just an individual experience either. Now in my 30s, more challenging situations have become more common for me, my friends, and my family. Death, loss, struggle, sickness, heartbreak, and defeat begin to creep in more as you age, build connections, and add people you love to your life. 

These events, even in their tragedy, mark a full life. It may be cliche to say, but feeling immense grief means that your life was filled with love. You only grieve what you love. You can only feel loss for something you cherished. 

Feeling immense love will, in time, mean feeling tremendous hurt. It’s an inescapable fact of the human experience. Because pain and suffering are inevitable, the only thing in our control is how we react to it. The lens through which we interpret and work through that pain.

One of my favorite books, Comfortable with Uncertainty by Pema Chodron, has a quote that speaks to this.

“Your own pain is like a stepping stone that makes your heart bigger.” 

Nobody can escape life without feeling pain and suffering. And, as I’m realizing now, the more we have that we love, the more we set ourselves up for feeling the pain when it’s gone. I love the intention of using that pain, a universal human experience that nobody escapes, as a stepping stone to increase our capacity to love. 

Bandit, my dog and best friend is nine. He’s happy and healthy now  🐕  Except I deeply know and feel that he will continue to gray in the next five years until his once fully tiger-striped face becomes completely white. How do I use that inevitable pain to open my heart even more?

How can we use our pain like a stepping stone to make our hearts bigger? 

According to Pema, it all begins with practicing compassion through loving-kindness meditation. First for ourselves, then for our loved ones, then for the world, especially the people we dislike.  

At the beginning of her book, Pema shares a loving kindness prayer that you can use to increase your capacity for turning your pain into love.

May all sentient beings enjoy happiness
and the root of happiness.
May we be free from suffering
and the root of suffering.
May we not be separated from the great
happiness devoid of suffering.
May we dwell in the great equanimity free
from passion, aggression, and prejudice.

To begin, you would repeat this prayer to yourself for 5-10 minutes, but instead of saying we or the plural, you would say I. Slowly, confidently, and with purpose, “May I enjoy happiness and the root of happiness.” 

And with each repetition, we realize that our suffering is not unique. It’s shared amongst every other person who has ever lived. And as we recognize the magnitude of that interconnectedness, our pain becomes a connection point for love.

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I hope you enjoyed this week’s newsletter. I will continue this theme in my next post and share more about the link between suffering and compassion.

-Jared

P.S. Interacting with my readers makes my week so keep the comments and responses coming. I’d love to hear your thoughts each week.