ManicDDaily

Opening Up To Pain

Still coping (expect to be coping for some time) with the death of a friend.

Sometimes when we experience loss, we get mad at the culture.  It didn’t prepare us for this.  It pushes death so far to the sidelines that it somehow masks its inevitability.

If you are like me, you may even feel that the culture’s dissonance with death has an economic underpinning–that it (the culture) wants to catch people up in the samsara of production and consumption with the implied promise that they will have some period of retirement, some deferred time, in which they can give importance to the less-material aspects of life.

If you are like me and already have a propensity to Eastern religions, you may think about the Buddhist practice of cultivating an awareness of death.  Traditionally, Buddhist monks would visit cremation grounds, expressly inhaling death and decay as part of their training.

If you are like me, you might compare that awareness with Western culture’s focus on youth and unbridled exuberance.   You may feel especially misled by the Western “can do” philosophy, the incipient moral of so many stories, fables, movies, news stories, that if one simply tries hard enough, the attainment of all goals, the extension of life itself, is possible.

If you are like me, you may blame this mythology for causing you pain, as if a big part of what you are feeling is the inability to make things right (especially difficult to accept when you have been conditioned to give tasks your all, and then to receive some positive result).

In some ways, this anger is comforting.  It shields you, at least for a while, from focusing on how painful the loss itself is; from understanding that the ongoing pain really doesn’t have all that much to do with the culture (however, misleading the culture might be).

All I can come up with as an analogy is cutting yourself while opening a can.  Yes, you can blame the can opener, the can manufacturer, yourself too;  you can be mad about how badly the whole thing is made, about how clumsy or ignorant you are; about how poorly schooled you’ve been in can-opening.  But putting aside all that, the cut just hurts.