I recently overheard a woman say, “Sometimes when things are dark, there’s a hidden blessing that you can’t see at the moment. It’s only later when your life is much different and better that you feel grateful and realize that it was all a blessing.” Or something like that.
As I was listening, I was thinking, “Oh boy. You’re in for a rough ride then. You’ve basically signed on for the Sisyphean life-adventure package!”
I thought it because if her measure of improvement is having a new and better life, then she’ll one day have to wake up to the fact that the new life will also one day become wretched and difficult, or else, be taken away from her as well, only to have to rebuild a new life yet again. This might occur incrementally or in one fell swoop, but it will happen.
When things are going bad, the blessing isn’t that we have something better coming down the pike. The blessing is that it provides an opportunity to train the mind and heart. For example, it’s easy to be grateful when things are good. It’s much harder to be grateful when someone you care for is dying or has died. It’s much harder to be grateful when you’re down in the dumps and nothing’s working in your life. But we don’t get to develop such capacities for gratitude unless we’re put in the dumps where we can practice then. That’s the blessing: the opportunity for internal change. Not what comes afterwards in our lives, externally.
And yet, the gift of darkness is only a gift if we practice training our minds in the midst of it. Otherwise, it’s just darkness. Neither good nor bad. Mostly misery, only to be followed by temporary relief and seeming improvement that doesn’t last.
If we’re not using the period of darkness and depression to train our minds and our hearts in the midst of it, then we’re sentencing ourselves to a Sisyphean fate, that of pushing the boulder of hope and promise up some existential hill, only to watch it roll down to the bottom, all so that we can do it again. And again. For an eternity…
…until we wake up to the fact that the single-minded pursuit of improving external conditions is at the root of this fixation, this seemingly never-ending plight.
