Other people’s words about … things falling apart

When you’ve passed through a difficult period, it can be tempting to yearn for a delivery of good fortune, or for experience that feels redemptive somehow. You want suffering to have purpose, for pain to be justified by wisdom or abundance or growth.

from Weekend Reading
by Gena of The Full Helping blog

I had an odd weekend recently, going through some of my old journals and photos for writing-related reasons. The entries I’d written in my journals back then, during a time in my twenties when I lived overseas — first in Texas, then England, then Germany, Cairo, Jakarta — were vividly descriptive of a life I no longer lead, nor will ever lead again. Those journal entries threw me back to a ‘me’ I hadn’t exactly forgotten but somehow, foolishly, thought I had let go of.

Although I have let go of that me, mostly.

My life, during those years I lived overseas, was filled with extremes — of loneliness, joy, excitement, fear, love, doubt, sorrow, terror, grief. There was one particularly difficult period, living in Jakarta with my then boyfriend, when one thing after another went terribly wrong, and I felt as though I was walking through my days — those days that made up my life as I then knew it — with my head down, just waiting for the next blow.

Like Gena, in the words I’ve quoted above, sometimes in Jakarta I just wanted those most difficult days to have a meaning. A purpose. But they didn’t. Even now, when I look back on those times, I find them hard to make sense of. I think I always will.

Gena quotes the Buddhist Nun Pema Chodron, who says the following in her book When Things Fall Apart:

We think that the point is to pass the test or overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.

These days, I would quibble with Pema Chodron’s use of the word healing — isn’t that just another way of saying you can solve things? — but then, I’m not a Buddhist. Or a Nun.

Still, I like the notion of things falling apart and then coming together again, only to fall apart once more; I find it immensely comforting. Even more, I like Pema Chodron’s simple statement, neither defeatist not celebratory, that life is just like that.

It is just like that, isn’t it?

The photographs accompanying today’s posts come from a recent trip to Yorke Peninsula. It was mid-November, and the late-spring flowers dappled the dunes. Fan flowers, common sea heath, grasses, sedges, acacias and other flowers I couldn’t identify and don’t usually see at home had sprung up everywhere, in every bare patch of sandy ground, in every sheltered nook, in every little cranny in the rocks. Walking amongst them, I felt things come together again in my heart, for a little while.

And then — well, then I let go. And walked on.