Hi Wonderful People!
I had a lot of social anxiety as a kid, and would have a small panic attack each time a Jehovah’s Witness walked up our driveway. I wasn’t comfortable talking to strangers, especially those who wanted to convert me. One afternoon when I was a teenager, I opened the door to find two people holding bibles on my doorstep. Before I could blurt, “No thank you,” and politely shut the door, they said, “If you give us just five minutes we will tell you why terrible things happen to wonderful people.” I invited them in.
I don’t recall any of what they said that day. It’s possible I was simply too young at the time to understand. I just know that when we said goodbye, I had even less of a clue as to why there were illnesses that caused unrelenting pain, why so many parents were forced to grieve the lost lives of their young children, why people were starving all over the globe, why pain itself existed?
The question might be the reason for every religion in the world. We want to make sense of devastation. We want to comprehend the incomprehensible. As a kid I wanted to go back 13.8 billion years to the beginning of time and ask, “Why make a universe that hurts?”
“It’s God’s will,” said my Sunday School teacher, each time I asked the question. “Why wasn’t it God’s will to make a planet where everyone is happy and healthy and fed all the time?” I’d respond, but never got an answer that didn’t irritate the living daylights out of me.
“Destruction is as vital as creation,” said my highschool science teacher. I’d ponder it for days at a time, accepting that exploding stars were vital. Black holes swallowing whole planets were vital. I knew erupting volcanoes fertilized the soil. I knew bunnies lost their lives so coyotes could eat dinner. But I couldn’t find a reason for human suffering. “Why?’ I’d keep asking. “Why make a universe that hurts?”
The day I was diagnosed with cancer, my therapist of sixteen years visited me in the hospital. Still drugged from surgery, I held my mother’s hand while she comforted us both with her gentle words. Just a couple of years prior she herself had received a cancer diagnosis. I’d watched her move through that time with grace and asked her to tell my mother and I how she had done it. “I decided from the very beginning that I was going to live in gratitude every second I could. I decided to hunt out joy wherever it could be found.”
Had she not said that, I might have spent the past two years in the relentless throes of never receiving an answer to the question, “Why is this happening?” It’s not that the question itself stopped knocking on my door. When I see friends and family in pain it’s still often impossible for me not to beg, “Why?” But when it comes to my own life challenges, for my own life’s sake, I have replaced that question with another: “How will I suck the sweetness out of this moment in my life, in spite of how bitter it may seem?”
The how, for me, is acceptance. To work to never battle with the facts of my life. To surrender to the knowing that living is full of challenges, and will always be full of challenges. I’ve shared this sentiment often in this newsletter, but it’s rocked me ever since I first heard Eckhart Tolle say it. To paraphrase—”Life is difficult. But it stops being so difficult when we expect it’s going to be difficult.”
Because there is so much human suffering that we can actually eliminate—with our activism, learning, or basic kindness, I think it lends us to unconsciously think we could do away with pain altogether. We’re inclined to believe that when we are struggling it is wrong or unfair. I don’t feel it’s wrong or unfair that I have cancer. It just is. The sense that it just is at once relaxes me and gives me the energy to fine-tune the instrument of my spirit so I can make as much music as possible from whatever comes my way.
Though it is now, this wasn’t initially a spiritual endeavor for me. In the beginning I had one very primitive goal—to suffer less. Don’t we all want to suffer less? Knowing chemo and cancer were going to bring physical struggles unlike any I’d experienced before, I knew I needed to have my mind and spirit be as buoyant as they could be. Acceptance was the first step in that process. Acceptance taught me that if the whole day is cloudy and the sun comes out for only a split second, I better get to juicing the sun for every sweet drop.
Each time I share this story, I share it knowing it’s my way, and my way isn’t for everyone. There are so many empowering paths to engaging the challenges in life. I’d love to hear what helps you suffer less. Consider the comment section of this post as my front door, opened wide, inviting you into my heart’s home, to hear what you have to say.
Love, Andrea 🖤
Why Do Terrible Things Happen To Wonderful People?
Letting it come through me. Letting it out. Moving to the seaside so I can take my pain and my too much and my questions and my tears to her and let it out with her. Letting her fill me back up once I'm ready for that. Surrounding myself with people who will ask how my spirit is, share how their own is holding up, and bring some flowers or cake or jokes when we meet, even if we meet online. Knowing that life is short enough as it is - if I only consider the Certified Joyful times as real living, I'm doing myself a disservice and cutting myself off from a fucktonne of beauty and grace.
I wish we didn't have to go through so many of the hard things that we do. I am grateful to have guides - of which you are a shining one - to show me possible ways to navigate the rocks and sheer cliffs.
Sending you love and gentleness.
In gratitude, always.
<3
Thank you for sharing this. I teared up. This is so beautiful. This part resonates so hard:
“I decided from the very beginning that I was going to live in gratitude every second I could. I decided to hunt out joy wherever it could be found.”
#JoyHunting
If I would have been asked what helps me suffer less 2.5 years ago, my answer would have been “I have BECOME suffering in it’s physical form, it is my identity, I don’t even have a human name anymore it’s just: Hi, I’m suffering nice to meet you”. I had spent years in and out of the icu, hospitals, being air ambualnced to yet another hospital to “treat my suffering” just enough to keep my physical body alive. (eating disorder)
Then something shifted. The first thing that helped me suffer less was finally putting myself first, taking a hard look at who was in my life, how the company I kept affected me, how I had unresolved trauma I needed to face, admitting that numbing my pain was actually prolonging my suffering, completely letting go of this dialogue in my head that for years told me “I deserve this pain I’m in”
I cut out the bad company I had, I unapologetically lived my life for myself for the first time, I took responsibility for healing, and not half assing it. And I noticed things starting to shift. The people I started attracting into my life were not tearing me down, but supportive and healthy, my now soon to be wife included.
It was like a light switch was flipped and I remember seeing a sunset for the first time while reflecting on this shift and just thinking to myself “I will never take another day for granted, my life is just beginning, at 32 it is just beginning and that is okay, now go make the most of it” prioritizing gratitude, self love, healing, sunsets, this healthy love I’ve found, and committing to being the best version of myself possible helps me suffer less now on a daily basis, bc even if I have a rough day… this might sound silly, but I always at the MINIMUM can have gratitude for the fact that there is one sunset a day and and that sunset always feels like home and reminds me of the feeling I had on the side of that mountain when I felt free for the first time.