What Survives the Fire
I was washing dishes this weekend whilst I looked out the window of my kitchen into the green outside. It was a sort of rainy day, and that always sets me to thinking.
In the middle of my wandering thoughts, I realized I held in my hands a large bluish green bowl that I've had for more than two decades. I'd used it to prepare a salad, and as I dried it to put it back in its place in the cupboard, I realized that this particular bowl has been with me through many great upheavals in my life. A movie of memories flashed through my mind as I put it in its place: the moves it has made with me (and how it managed to make those moves when a great many other more valuable things did not); the way I've carelessly handled it and used it time again to feed my family, the way it sits neglected in my cabinet until I need it again.
This line of thinking led me to wonder: how is it that certain things survive the fires of our life and others do not? And taken beyond the physical, what is left of us when those fires die? What do we become after that?
As we move through life, we will likely encounter any number of fires - both personal and physical. These events may take any form: divorce, illness, grief over the death of a loved one, they may even be actual fires that burn our homes to the ground or force us to evacuate. Whatever they may be, we tend to sometimes view them as harmful, and we often view our emergence from them as avoiding harm. I believe, however, that this lens is incorrect.
Pain and suffering are - in any context - great teachers. We are often unable to see past the pain of loss - we cannot fathom how we got here. We know, of course, that suffering happens all the time around us. We read about it online and see it in the news. It's everywhere. But to us? How can it happen to us? How did we not see it coming? How is it that managed to wake up one benign, mundane Tuesday morning having lost everything overnight? How is it that we did not see our marriage of 32 years dissolving before our eyes? How did we sleep through that? No, it can't be. These things happen to someone else, but not to us. Never to us, right?
We are insulated and encapsulated from the beginning of our lives until the very end. We strive for comfort and security, though we rely on our culture to define for us what those things mean. In the West, comfort is marketed as the picket-fence-surrounded home with two cars and a family. Income security - which most of the world does not have - is touted as a way of life here. Marriage is for a lifetime, right? And death -when it comes - is so far away that I don't have to think about it right now, do I? So with all of these worries out of the way, what can possibly go wrong?
Except these systems are created by us, and they do fail. Things do go wrong, and quite often. But when they do, we are so trapped in our fictional bubbles that we are blind-sided by the fall of our little empires that often we feel the sting so sharply we cannot recover and become a whole person again. Divorce can apparently lead to an early demise, so deep are its scars. The loss of one's home is often felt as deeply as the loss of a loved one. And there are other scenarios that may elicit these responses from us. These are our fires - this is the burning of our dreams and visions. This is the loss of all we held dear.
The pain of these losses - whatever form they take - is not to be diminished. It is, however, worthy of being examined.
If we look at this pain caused from these fires - if we look at the scars left by this burning - what will we find? We will find underneath this there is still left the fabric of us - of our human selves. The loss we grieve for - a loved one, perhaps, or a job, or a home destroyed in a storm - is a part of us. It is a part of our human fabric. It may have the strength to cripple us forever, but we may also be able to find in it a part of us we've not yet met. If we look inside the black hole left by these losses, we will likely see small threads of our fabric left behind. Those small threads are still a part of something - they are still part of us. They may one day become the dishes we wash (while we remember the fires they came through), or they may one day become the tipping points by which we measure the remainder of our days. Either way, we ascribe to them their role in our future, and it is we who determine our outcomes.
These fires are intended as teachers, then, not as destroyers. They are not our enemies. They are painful, but they are our becoming. We are becoming human through these processes of loss and grief, and we are learning. We need to re-imagine how we view our emergence from these events, and stop seeing them as tragedy. Did they hurt? Absolutely. But did we learn? Oh yes we did. We learned so much. What survives these fires remakes us, and what take away from our suffering should become the cornerstone upon which we continue to build.
What has survived your fire, my anonymous friend?
