Accepting whatever life offers: Remen excerpt #4

Dr Remen says that as as a child she hid pieces of a puzzle that her parents were working on, which were dark and made her feeling uncomfortable. When her parents asked if she knew where the missing pieces were, she showed them and explained her feeling. She recalls watching her mother complete the puzzle . . .

As piece after dark piece was put in place and the picture emerged, I was astounded. I had not known there would be a picture. It was quite beautiful, a peaceful scene of a deserted beach. Without the pieces I had hidden, the game had made no sense.

Perhaps winning requires that we love the game unconditionally. Life provides all the pieces. When I accepted certain parts of life and denied and ignored the rest, I could only see my life a piece at a time—the happiness of a success or a time of celebration, or the ugliness and pain of a loss or a failure I was trying hard to put behind me out of sight. But like the dark pieces of the puzzle, these sadder events, painful as they are, have proven themselves a part of something larger. What brief glimpses I have had of something hidden seem to require accepting as a gift every last piece.

We are always putting the pieces together without knowing the picture ahead of time. I have been with many people in times of profound loss and grief when an unsuspected meaning begins to emerge from the fragments of their lives. Over time, this meaning has proven itself to be durable and trustworthy, even transformative. It is a kind of strength that never comes to those who deny their pain.

Over the years I have seen the power of taking an unconditional relationship to life. I am surprised to have found a sort of willingness to show up for whatever life may offer and meet with it rather than wishing to edit and change the inevitable. Many of my patients also seem to have found their way to this viewpoint on life.

When people begin to take such an attitude, they seem to become intensely alive, intensely present. Their losses and suffering have not caused them to reject life, have not cast them into a pace of resentment, victimization, or bitterness. As a friend with HIV/DISA puts it, ‘I have let go of my preferences and am living with an intense awareness of the miracle of the moment.’ Or in the words of another patient, ‘When you are walking on thin ice, you might as well dance.’

From such people I have learned a new definition of the word ‘joy.’ I had thought joy to be rather synonymous with happiness, but it seems now to be far less vulnerable than happiness. Joy seems to be a part of an unconditional wish to live, not holding back because life may not meet our preferences and expectations. Joy seems to be a function of the willingness to accept the whole, and to show up to meet with whatever is there. It has a kind of invincibility that attachment to any particular outcome would deny us. Rather than the warrior who fights toward a specific outcome and therefore is haunted by the specter of failure and disappointment, it is the lover drunk with the opportunity to live despite the possibility of loss, the player for whom playing has become more important than winning or losing.

There is a fundamental paradox here. The less we are attached to life, the more alive we can become. The less we have preferences about life, the more deeply we can experience and participate in life. Embracing life may be more about . . . trusting one’s ability to take joy in the newness of the day and what it may bring. More about adventure than having your own way.

Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal (Riverhead books, 1996), pages 170-171.