There's a beautiful poem posted by CM on his blog, giganticjet. It ends up with these lines:
Of the vast panorama of emotions we each experience, I've come to believe that pain -- the one emotion most of us try to avoid at all costs -- is the most beneficial and productive. It is through pain that we learn life's greatest lessons. While there's no question we can also learn from joy and ecstasy, the lessons derived from pain run much deeper.
But, in my mind's eye, the key to gaining wisdom from pain is borne of another element - memory. More importantly, willful memory.
Whatever emotions we experience in our routine existence, they only will serve us with the greatest impact if we feel them in the moment AND hold on to them in our memory. This is not to suggest that we wallow in our inadequacies and misery, only that we retain a fragment of the loss or anguish that was experienced.
People who live solely in the moment too often tend to repeat the same mistakes over and over again. If we don't commit ourselves to willful memory, the lessons learned are so quickly forgotten.
On the whole, wisdom is gained incrementally. It is built upon the edifice of past successes and failures. If as soon as we experience emotion, we put it behind us, then we break the continuity of the incremental process and find, at the end of the day, we are no wiser than we were before.
So, pain (or joy for that matter) is of no long-term use to any of us unless we remember the emotion and its direct affect on us. Those fragments are the building blocks of wisdom.
i've been told time healsI found that the imagery really resonated with me today. It got me to thinking about pain and so I thought I would make this the focus of this blog entry. However, the more I contemplated what I planned to write, the more I realized that pain would only be a side issue and something else would provide the main thrust.
all wounds no matter how bad
they hurt
i'll take solace in this and wait
but many things go away and
never return
Of the vast panorama of emotions we each experience, I've come to believe that pain -- the one emotion most of us try to avoid at all costs -- is the most beneficial and productive. It is through pain that we learn life's greatest lessons. While there's no question we can also learn from joy and ecstasy, the lessons derived from pain run much deeper.
But, in my mind's eye, the key to gaining wisdom from pain is borne of another element - memory. More importantly, willful memory.
Whatever emotions we experience in our routine existence, they only will serve us with the greatest impact if we feel them in the moment AND hold on to them in our memory. This is not to suggest that we wallow in our inadequacies and misery, only that we retain a fragment of the loss or anguish that was experienced.
People who live solely in the moment too often tend to repeat the same mistakes over and over again. If we don't commit ourselves to willful memory, the lessons learned are so quickly forgotten.
On the whole, wisdom is gained incrementally. It is built upon the edifice of past successes and failures. If as soon as we experience emotion, we put it behind us, then we break the continuity of the incremental process and find, at the end of the day, we are no wiser than we were before.
So, pain (or joy for that matter) is of no long-term use to any of us unless we remember the emotion and its direct affect on us. Those fragments are the building blocks of wisdom.
Good, good post! In many difficult life situations, one can neither step away nor bury one's head in the sand. The pain must be confronted head-on in order to gain anything useful.
ReplyDeleteAll I can offer on the subject is a poem I wrote a few years ago:
Oh earth
I am grateful
that you smell
like a downtown bank, like a doctor's office
for your plastic-wrapped mints that say "thank you"
for your clerk who smiles
and does not know my name.
Thanks for sharing. That's a beautiful poem too! I like the sentiment.
ReplyDelete