I was listening to an old podcast by CNN anchor Anderson Cooper which guested another media host, Steven Colbert and they were having this thoughtful discussion about handling grief. Not a jolly topic to be tackling I know, but in the said podcast, Colbert had offered a powerful suggestion or mindset which I just wanted to share.
He said, while referring to the course of personal tragedies in his life, eventually coming to terms with one’s grief was the only recourse one could ever have. This is so because no one can ever win against grief. It comes unexpectedly to everyone during any stage in their lives and there is just really no preparation for it. When it comes, the only thing to do is to experience it. Because of this, his own take was coming to “love the things you most wish had not happened.”
Well, but not right away, he cautioned. There are no do-it-yourself handbooks on how to treat “punishments of God” (as he termed it) as gifts. Through time, while it’s natural to undergo stages, one gradually arrives at a realization of acceptance and from there, you become better because of the experience. That also manifests in how you treat others.
“It’s a gift to exist and with existence comes suffering. There’s no escaping that… I didn’t learn it… (being) grateful for the thing I most wish had not happened, instead I realized it. It’s an odd feeling…I don’t want it to happen…I want it to have not happened… but if you have to be grateful for your life, then you have to grateful for all of it. You can’t choose what you’re grateful for.”
Long ago, while scanning through a book on Buddhism in an outdoor bookstore, I read the first three words by Buddha which simply stated: Life is cruel. Following up from Colbert’s realization, I thought, it’s from there that everything else follows. So, on accepting life is cruel and hard, how can I forget my mother’s take on the pain of cancer inside her? It’s like “the pain of Christ’s sufferings”; was how she accepted it, religious as she was till the end. Then, when she talked about the death of our youngest brother, while she had accepted how he died, she said no one really forgets the death of a son.
So here. While common in both the traditions of Christianity and Buddhism, suffering as a part of life may be harder to accept the moment you input the tragedies that go on in the world at present. To be specific even, how does this calculate with tragedies caused by injustices in the country? Does it mean we just accept it as part of the cycle of life? Does it mean we hold on to the blessing that the meek shall inherit the earth in the end?
Whatever path one fancies, “two things only” (as Puring, an old friend would say) gratefully moving forward and treating it as a gift for better things to do or remaining bitter till the end and making it the driving force to what’s ahead.
