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Gratitude for things as a whole
Dear Reader,
I have written a great deal on accepting things in totality, without sharing any methods. This axiom serves to provide it.
The average person reminisces fondly of moments of joy and peace, but does not do the same of pain and suffering. Not unless it happens to be intense enough to have overwritten her worldview, or its telling simply offers social value.
I have had my own measure of suffering in the time I have lived. I was let go unsuspectingly from a job I had staked my future upon. I had felt extended periods of loneliness, having moved to a new country I had never before visited, where I also underwent a stage of disillusionment in regards to the foundations of my sense of self — the Christian faith I was born into — living in a postmodern society that skewed heavily against it. My mother had cancer at a time I was unable to travel back to see her. As if life itself is not enough of a load to carry! Yet, I am certain many more curveballs are about to come my way (such is the nature of life) and what deserves concern is not them, but my attitude towards them.
Even so, as effectively as I may frame such oscillations, the feeble humanity in me prescribes physiological responses beyond my control. My constitution must be put through peaks and troughs of all varieties. Not that my suffering is special (clearly, it is not)! Such things are sufficiently uniform across the human species to be all comparable — as pleasure is to suffering, love is to indifference, faith is to doubt, freedom is to tyranny — there is a whole suite of dualities that human nature prescribes for its kind. That is why there exists a nigh-universal ruler to measure the desirability or undesirability of a particular experience or thing.
Indeed, the average person does not reminisce fondly of pain and suffering, and rather tends to speak ill of it. What she has not yet considered is that her peace would amount to nothing without her suffering.
🪟 12 - Gratitude for things as a whole
Day and Night (1938) by M. C. Escher (Source)
To accept things in totality is to accept what must necessarily exist. In fact, it is to go so far as to love and hold dear to them, as we do what is desirable. And what must necessarily exist?
Human nature ascribes value where there lurks an opposite. There is nothing that we value, and therefore desire, that does not have a counterpart. In fact, it is precisely because there exists the possibility of an otherwise that we, in the first place, value a thing. The objects of our desire are therefore two-folded, containing within them not only the desirable, but the undesirable.
Given this, what is the sense in caring only for the desirable when it forms one part of a whole? Now, it will come across more clearly if I analogise it to those we love. How can a man, towards his spouse, care only for her desirable aspects? If he somehow managed to erase those aspects of her deemed not-so-desirable, she would cease to exist! As it is to her imperfection, it is to the nature of what we value.
How can we be grateful for the sparks of joy, but not the looming of sadness? How can we be grateful for the displays of beauty, but not of ugliness? Of meaning without disillusionment? Peace without unrest? Life without death? Fondness without absence? In the course of life, one is fated to turbulence between two ends of countless measures. But a ruler would cease to exist without one of its two ends.
It is why those first afflicted with sickness become more appreciative of good health, and why those steeped in poverty become more appreciative of wealth. It is why “absence makes the heart fonder”. It is why Dostoevsky writes: "The darker the night, the brighter the stars. The deeper the grief, the closer is God!" One always values the desirable in relation to its counterpart.
So let us accept with heart, or love, all things as they come. Let us be unbiased in our gratitude, and love the pain and suffering that life brings as companions, as we do the beauty and joy it also brings. Remember that one would not exist without the other. And once we manage this radical act of accepting all things, we will be firmly grounded.
Till next time,
Euwyn