You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life."
— .J Krishnamurti, Think on These Things
I am trying to understand life, I dance, I sing, I write, I read - and yet my life is a puzzle piece in a bigger puzzle for which I don't have an understanding. Things that seem perfectly obvious to me must be misapprehensions on my part because I find few others who think in the same way. Take suffering for instance - I will grant that it's part of life but my understanding of suffering is that we should try to ease it, to console those who are suffering, to reduce the burden under which they strain. And yet suffering is the way of most of the world. Few are free from it, many never have one moment without it. And those who appear to suffer the least also appear to be the most indifferent to the suffering of others. But I will grant that it is life.
And perhaps that is the conundrum of suffering - that it exists, that it is incomprehensible, that it does not honor one's station in life or one's honor or one's morality Suffering is the leveler of those who suffer. And a reminder to others that the capricious nature of suffering grants no one protection. When we hear of the suffering of others it causes us to pull the blankets closer, to hug our loved ones more, to hold on tighter to that which we could lose without a moment's notice.
Maybe that is exactly the wrong reaction, perhaps holding on is the most impossible in the face of unpredictability. Perhaps we must sing and dance and write poems in the face of suffering, to let wretched fate know it does not have the final word, the last say. When we understand the whole of life we recognize that suffering exists but does not trump life.
You hear people who have lost much, suffered greatly, talk about their appreciation of what they still have, their family, their photos, their memories, their minds, their bodies, their hearts. They can still sing and dance even if it is with more awareness of the price of the gift. And is not the triumph of spirit that we do. When I was young and someone in our family died the wake was always a great raucous affair with lots of drinking and hugging and yelling and crying. I kind of got that but what I couldn't understand was the laughter - when my aunts and uncles and parents would let out great whoops of laughter over memories of the dead person. They would laugh until their sides hurt, their eyes watered, gasping for breath. It would shock me, why were they laughing when Grandma was dead. To my young mind it seemed incomprehensible - the occasion called for more solemnity and sorrow I thought. Weren't they the greatest role models for understanding that life is greater than death, the sky more immense than the small patch of earth where I live? So in their own way my family sang and danced in the face of the mystery of death and loss.
Even today I can hear that laughter echoing through time and space. The laughter of healing and consolation. I visited India many years ago and was stunned by the overwhelming poverty and squalor. There was no escaping it, everywhere you looked it was. And yet what remains in my mind is the great artistry of the people there, the beautiful things they created with hands that were crippled, and with no means to escape the cruel circumstances of life. And their great wedding celebrations that went on for days and that whole villages participated in. And everyone danced the groom to the bride and sang and celebrated this uniting as if there was nothing in life that could be more important or sacred. And the beautiful Hindu temples with their great statues of monkeys and elephants, rooms bejeweled and pristine. All this in a land of squalor.
My hope is that we never take for granted the circumstances that grant us comfort and security for they are temporary. Suffering is part of life. And in it's face we need to learn to offer comfort, to hold on to one another, to dance and sing and read and thank God for this great incomprehensible mystery of life that gives us so many opportunities to love and comfort and support each other. I may never understand the whole of life but I do now understand those great whoops of laughter echoing again and again in my heart as I behold the whole of life.
