The pain might not fuel your journey

Dear Friend,

There’s a quote by Kenji Miyazawa that says, “We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey.”

You think Kenji didn’t know what he was talking about. Not only can’t you do anything about this pain. You can’t even do anything with it. It’s like a heavy useless marble block just sitting there. Actually it’s not like marble. Because at least with marble, you can chip pieces off and turn it into a sculpture. But this pain you can’t translate into any form of art, because you can’t comprehend it yourself so you just carry it with you day in, day out, hoping that one day you will wake up and it will no longer be there.

Maybe by then your threshold for pain would have shifted so you don’t feel it anymore, or maybe the pain would have in fact simply gone. Just disappeared. But does it really go away? Or does it remain in a more dormant form waiting for the smallest thing -word, gesture, breeze – to trigger it when you least expect it?

We are all wounded. It’s part of being human. And yet the human spirit is resilient. It makes you go on even when you feel like giving up. It makes you dig your way out when you’ve been buried under crumbling stones of despair.

We are all wounded, but maybe we need to think of ourselves in terms of kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing cracks with pieces of gold so that the broken is more beautiful than the new.

And the pain…it might not fuel your journey, but it does serve a purpose.

E. K. Ross says, “The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.”

http://ifixit.org/