Let It Rain

All these years I’ve tried avoiding pain when I should’ve been providing it a home. Happiness is fine. But it’s notoriously fleeting. There is always something giddy and silly about happiness. It’s a tease. Everyone wants to feel happiness. It’s an obsession. Especially in the United States. Positivity is exalted. Pessimism is condemned. It’s assumed that if that one is consistently happy and positive and brings a cheerful attitude to the abrasions of daily life one will become rich and in full control of one’s destiny. I’m reminded of the opening scene in Night of the Iguana of all the middle-aged women singing “Happy Days Are Here” again on the bus which is driven by a fatigued and afflicted Reverend Dr. T. Lawrence Shannon, played brilliantly by Richard Burton. There’s an evident undercurrent of deep unhappiness among the women but they put so much force and vigor into their singing that their zeal seems freakish, almost demonic, a toxic whitewash in its stubborn refusal to admit any dark emotion or untoward feeling reveal itself, particularly any natural or authentic energies that could ruin the artifice and allow a space for more genuine and therefore dangerous feelings.   

No one has succeeded in defining happiness, but everyone knows that as soon as one becomes aware that one is happy it evaporates. Worry sets in immediately that you can’t keep it, don’t deserve it, can’t use it to immunize oneself against the adversities of life.

If you Google happiness quotes you’ll get 14,142 citations, the vast majority of them completely inane and a few that make no sense at all. One which stood out is Mark Twain’s observation that “Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination.” I like this because Twain isn’t pushing happiness as a sacrosanct condition conducive to the overall wellbeing of a culture but presenting it as a suspect state, the product, no doubt, of delusional thinking, of filtering out information that isn’t consistent with an attitude of triumphalist positivity. Because if you look at the human condition squarely and honestly you see it for what it is, a chronically insecure predicament of loss and vulnerability. The Buddhists are right: don’t get attached to things. Life is a state of continuous flux in which nothing lasts except the dynamism of change itself. Buddhists stress compassion, not happiness. And if you enter almost any Christian church you’ll see a man hanging on a cross with open wounds and a crown of thorns, sometimes unconscious, sometimes looking heavenward. It’s an odd paradox that the same culture that is so obsessed with this story of sacrifice and agony places such an obsessive premium on happiness.

So why not give pain a broad and open acceptance? I really like the mindfulness attitude toward pain. It isn’t viewed as negative or punitive or a crippling, stigmatized condition to be endured with as much dignity and stoicism as one can muster and treated with an armament of pain medication. Mindfulness practice urges the removal of judgment. If pain is experienced with less resistance and the kind of denigration and shame with which we color it when we’re locked into it subjectively, and begin to value it more objectively as a sensory phenomenon with no moralistic evaluation imposed on it pain – particularly chronic pain - becomes much easier to bear.

So give it a home. The harder you try to avoid it or end it the harder it is to deflect and evade.

Easier said than done, I know. Easy to be glib. Hard to be ingenious and breezy when you’re buried in black despair or feeling the stabbing pain of a cancerous tumor.

“Pain has an element of blank,” observed Emily Dickinson in one of her poems. “It cannot recollect / When it began, or if there were / A day when it was not.”

I vividly remember the day I fell and dislocated my shoulder. It’s been over two years and the pain is still with me. It was also discovered that I had arthritis in that shoulder. I’ve been experiencing intermittent pain there for some time. The fall so traumatized and aggravated the pain as to make it a permanent resident in my body. It has become so integrated in my overall sensorium that it now feels like a part of my identity. Pain can be so immersive and all enveloping that its defining features become lost and it becomes increasingly difficult to assign it a history with finite parameters and comprehensible data. It becomes a big blur. It’s like playing chess with an extraterrestrial.

Emotional pain is the hardest to describe. People who’ve never experienced clinical depression have no idea what it’s like. They think it’s a bad mood. Snap out of it, they say. Look on the bright side. Clinical depression isn’t just a bad mood. It’s a dimension, like the realm of the Upside Down in the TV drama Stranger Things, a subterranean domain of toxic mists and giant snakes and ravenous bipedal hounds. Once there, it’s extremely difficult to get out. You can see the world in which you once lived and led a life of reasonable well-being, loved ones, friends, familiar people. You can see them but you can’t interact with them.

The way out is through acceptance. You lean into it. Lean into the pain. Lean into the despair. Lean into the anxiety and accept it. Shake hands with the darkness. Get to know your inner demon. In Greek mythology, a demon – which comes from the Greek word daimon – was a tutelary deity, a divine spirit.

Nietzsche saw pleasure and pain as a false and unimportant polarity. He saw them as epiphenomena, wholly secondary affectivities “on which everyone conscious of creative powers and an artistic conscience will look down not without derision, nor without pity.” He saw suffering as an art, a discipline. “The discipline of suffering, of great suffering,” Nietzsche proclaimed, “do you not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far?”

I’m not sure I see it that way myself, but I like Nietzsche’s bravado and articulating an evident relationship between suffering and creativity. I do know that it helps immeasurably to bring a creative response to pain. Give it a mouth. Give it a pot and a calliope and a big fur hat. Give it a bed of topsoil and a load of compost and wait to see what grows out of that.