“Hold To What Is Difficult”

I stumbled across the words above many years ago. I didn’t know who Rainer Marie Rilke was then. But, his words had an effect upon me. I think at the time they were just so contrary I remembered them, and even more strangely took them to heart. Now, looking back, I’m surprised by the impact they have made on me, and even more surprised that I had the wisdom to have remembered and even navigated by them. That peculiar delight, is not the reason I am choosing to reflect on these words, and the experience they embody, instead I am compelled to look at how they capture something about our lived experience, that I find somewhat miraculous. In the difficult, I find, there lives a grace that changes everything.

As you may know, I have grown to believe that my life is not my own. My so-called life is Life’s life. The rigors of a life lost, and the advent of a disabled/enabled life, made all of this clear to me. I am a representative of Life, whether I like it, or not. Life has brought me back to being human again. And, this time, I’m feeling so much more, and I’m aware like I never have been. I seem to have a kind of non-conventional awareness I would never have cultivated.  I exist here, but not like I would ever have imagined. My mind seems to have a wild canniness. This leaves me breathless, embarrassed, wondering, and so awed. I like it, am often afraid of what comes to light, and I never feel abandoned, orphaned, or alone. The Universe seems to me to be both my playground, and the one playing me.

All of that contributes to my returned attention to what is difficult. There is something here, some twisting, mobilous, mystery that makes me want to sit-up and pay attention. I have been roughed up by Life. I don’t have any illusions about that. I was hurting, afraid, and pissed off for a long time. Sometimes, like for instance when I’m struggling to get dressed, or I can’t for the life of me understand something I know is simple, or I have dropped something on the floor for the third time, then I can still get pissed. But, more often now, I just laugh. Life, being me, is ridiculously impossible, yet here I am.

Life has really come through the hardships of my life. I have been changed, amplified, challenged to my core, concentrated, baffled, and made more whole while being reduced to a quivering mass. None of it was my doing. Life just picked me up by the back of my neck and did me over. I went along…… crying, hopeless, helplessly quaking, and thinking there must be a better way. There never was, and I’m coming to believe, there may never be.

Life delivered what was left of me, to a different, better state. Someone asked me recently if I could do it over, would I prefer anything different? “No,” I said. It seems Life roughed me up, just right. Since then I’ve come to believe that Life is the Teacher, Guru, Enlightened Being, nudging me toward home. And, I now see that Life has a repertoire of stimulants that goes way beyond what I would wish on my worst enemy.

“Hold to what is difficult” Now I take these words of Rilke, to mean that where life seems to be cracking up, it is probably cracking open. This is, as the poet Leonard Cohen points out, “where the light gets in.” From where I sit now, the personal breakdowns, painful relationship snags, and group times of chaos, are all the breakout of Life. It may be asking more of us then we can deliver, but it isn’t abandoning us. The difficult is actually Life.

Life frequently asks more of me than I want. Life can be a nuisance that way. Sometimes, mostly, I resent it. Once in a great while, I feel grateful. Life keeps stretching, and ripening me. I actually grow up. It is all somewhat unbelievable!  The thing I don’t want to go through, is just the exact thing I have to go through, to be a me, worth being. There is a kind of symmetry and strange inhuman justice here that just silences me.

No one could have adequately explained any of this to me. My parents, probably in their deepest roots, were as baffled as I am. Sadly, I think they succumbed to the virulent, and rampant belief, that something must be wrong with them (or the rest of us) if the miraculous wasn’t obvious. I can forgive them.  Can I forgive me, you, the rest of us? Yep, if I am willing to hold to what is difficult.