Turning Suffering into Strength : Delights of the Ordinary- Classics. No. 58 (S2)
Our lives are deeply fertile, shaped more by suffering than the cushiony comfort. So we keep on reconciling the sorrows of life with its joys.
Delights of the Ordinary is for us who are trapped in the world of hustle culture but are quiet at heart with an itching creative bone. This newsletter intersects culture, art, science, and philosophy with our practical 9-5 job space.
“…and love is so good & powerful — it’s worth preserving …— dearest riches have never made people great but love does it every day — we’re not little people — we’re giants …”
- Richard Feynman
In these generously crispier sunny mornings of our October, I happen to sheepishly admire this actuality that ‘our life is ordinarily sufficient.’ Sufficient, even when it is dusted with good and the bad! With the sane and the insane! With its joys and its sorrows! With love and suffering!
Since we all remember the world as largely muddled and murky, and learning that we all suffer. And that is why we talk, talk through these letters on some pretty complexly baffling topics (like suffering) once in a while! Especially, when our daily lives make us oscillate maddeningly faster than we should, overpowering our sanguinity and creating stretch marks in our optimism.
But then we should also know that the world is also forgiving and perpetually evolving, making lots of redemptive cracks, to let that ‘living light’ enter through them. And the loveliest thing about life is that it cascades in waves, rising as well as falling in momentums. Still, then, our tiny beating heart mostly remembers the glum moments more than the happy ones!
Hence, allow this October to be that slot where you may be able to sit for a while and figure out that our ordinary lives are sufficient as they are. It will give sufficient grace to bear the sorrow, to accept the uncomplicated joys, to gather all the straws of strength amidst the most atrocious forms of suffering.
They are all sufficient in our today!
To Suffer:
In my candour, I have zero qualifications to even risk my moral and philosophical agility in an attempt to answer this complex topic. Because I have no answers beyond my own experiences or my agony mixed views that were formed helplessly seeing others suffer.
Yet, Ursula K. Le Guin in her wise words touches the fragility of suffering. She says, “It exists… It’s real. I can call it a misunderstanding, but I can’t pretend that it doesn’t exist, or will ever cease to exist. Suffering is the condition on which we live. And when it comes, you know it. You know it as the truth.”
I experienced this sort of suffering after my mother passed away. Not in the moment of her passing away. But only days after she passed away.
The immediacy of any loss is mostly marked with surging emotions. This is a different sort of suffering. But when the teary-eyed, lamenting feelings pass and our rational reasonings take over, it is another type of suffering. The sort that looms over your ordinary, day-to-day form of tenancy. Breaking and mending you, all at the same time.
And now when I think over my loss that I experienced almost three years ago, I now, can clearly see the cracks similar to hairline fractures, tepidly breaking the skeleton of my life. Back then, I was experiencing some form of renovation under the collapses done by calamity.
It was this very loss that gradually brought back the grit in my bones, recalcifying and straightening my spine - vertebrae by vertebrae - reconstructing my will to write about life and all its arbitrariness and so was the birth of this tiny newsletter - Delights of the Ordinary!
rain falling, so thick that when you looked out of the window you could see neither the mountains nor the woods nor even the stream in the garden.
- C.S. Lewis
Turning Suffering Into Strength
To acknowledge our sufferings can be a humungous task.
Yet, in the first step, we recognise suffering to be true, real and it exist.
The next step is to recognise this other truth by Seneca, that “we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”
Third, we have a choice of action in any given circumstance.
Lastly, we hopefully learn to put humour in the horizon.
Viktor Emil Frankl (1905 – 1997) was an Austrian neurologist, psychologist, philosopher, and WWII holocaust survivor and writer of many books on psychology. In one of his famous books Man’s Search For Meaning (which I am currently reading), he reckons what suffering is and through his personal experience and the experiences of his fellow inmates he found meaning in the most cruel, hellish torments foisted upon human beings in the history known to us.
He writes, “We who lived in concentration camp can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from man but one thing: the last of the human freedom - to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
In a lot of our practical, AI-sequenced, gadget-loaded life, all of it may feel like a legendry tale of some unknown era, but if you look closely, the north star wisdom remains that suffering in its ongoing trauma refashions us, until we want to resist it. “The thing about working with time, instead of against it, …is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts.”
Putting Humour into Horizon
To sometimes, look for humour in the most atrocious sufferings can feel downright stupid.
Obviously, finding humour amidst suffering will not mean laughing brainlessly or entertaining ourselves at the cost of others. It means how we orient ourselves to our suffering or to the suffering of others in a way that lightens the emotional trauma and puts off the heaviness from our hearts.
“A kind of cabret was improvised from time to time. A hut was cleared temporarily, a few wooden benches were pushed… and program was drawn up… They came to have a few laughs or perhaps to cry a little; anyway, to forget. There were songs, poems, jokes… All were meant to help us forget, and they did help… that a few ordinary prisoners went to see the cabaret in spite of their fatigue even though they missed their daily portion of food…” writer Viktor Frankl about his camp life. He writes further “Humor was another of soul’s weapons in the fight for self-preservation.”
I hope this helps!
Yet I also understand that the delicate patterns of our life can never fit into four-point life lessons. Our lives are deeply fertile, shaped more by suffering than the cushiony comfort. So we keep on reconciling the sorrows of life with its joys. “Our humanness is not given to us. Instead, it requires our participation in its construction and realisation, which often comes about through collapse or calamity. We rummage through the chaos of our inner worlds, through our multitude of selves, to discover what we are, what we wish to be, and our authentic relationship with the world… We must separate the wheat from the chaff.”
To End:
Condensing the poetry The Wild Iris by Louise Glück [You may read the complete poem here (Link)]
At the end of my suffering
there was a door.from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure sea water.
Thank you for being here and thanks for reading.
I will see you on the other side of the week. Till then keep shining. You are a star.
- Anugrah
Delights of the Ordinary is for us who are trapped in the world of hustle culture but are quiet at heart with an itching creative bone. This newsletter intersects culture, art, science, and philosophy with our practical 9-5 job space.
Who am I?
Hi, I am Anugrah. I write Delights of the Ordinary for us who are trapped in the world of hustle culture but are quiet at heart with an itching creative bone and love for life. My newsletter intersects culture, art, and inner health in our practical 9-5 job space. Feel free to share. You can know more about me here and here.
Delights of the Ordinary currently is a free publication. Yet it takes me many hours of effort to write and curate it. I may need lots of coffee to keep me going. You can :)
Stumbled on my publication? Explore all my previous editions here. And in case you don’t wish to spend time browsing then complement this post with The Antidote for Self-Doubt, We Imagine Because We Are Living or read about Decision Fatigue and Our Creative Life.
If you ever feel like dropping in a message or a comment, do not hesitate. We all can only thrive in people. We can be those ordinary creative beings who can change the world. You and me.
Can relate with you..."Not in the moment of her passing away......................." Every word makes a sense.
Much love
Your lyrical prose is a perfect vehicle to carry the deep reflections about life