Gratitude for Difficult Things

"In a dark time, the eye begins to see."

Dogs, chilling

It’s still dark out. Fairy lights are twinkling in our fireplace, and I am bracketed by sleepy dogs - one resting his chin on my knee. It has been raining hard all night. Our cat loudly announced his reappearance at 6am and we had to turn a light on and towel him down - he was sopping. I have a cold, and so my dressing gown pockets are stuffed with tissues. As the radiator warms me, gratitude soaks through my body and into the tips of my fingers and toes.

It is easy to feel gratitude for Sunday mornings like this. After two brim-full weeks, a deliciously empty day stretches ahead of me. The only ‘job’ I’ve lined up for myself is baking Biscoff brownies studded with chunks of salted chocolate.

It is harder to find gratitude for Difficult Things.

This morning I’m curious about how grateful am I feeling for the endless delays in our house-move. This has been my Most Difficult Thing in a long time. A desperate urge to change my whole life fountained inside me in February, and since then I have been grappling with raging desire, powerlessness and very high levels of stress. If you’d told me back then that we’d still be living in the temple with Christmas fast approaching, I could hardly have born it.

And yet. Yesterday I was gazing at an old patch of peeling paint in our hallway - sky blue breaking through the white - and a bloom of grief at leaving this place arose. The thought came: I could stay here forever, and be happy.

I am also feeling a (totally unexpected) deep appreciation that it has all taken so long.

If it hadn’t, I’d be moving house in the middle of my craziness, driven by adrenaline and control freakery. If it hadn’t, we wouldn’t have a large chunk of money we’ve saved up over the past few months. If it hadn’t, we wouldn’t have been here to ease the transition of the folk now running the temple. If it hadn’t, I wouldn’t be listening right now to the song of deep dog snores with funky rain percussion.

If it hadn’t, I wouldn’t be tasting the sweetness I’m tasting right now. The sweetness of being more than okay in previously really-not-okay circumstances. The breaking through of something infinitely bigger and more beautiful than my small-ego narrow-focus will could imagine.

I wonder what it is that’s allowed this shift from wanting-things-to-be-otherwise to appreciating-them-as-they-are. I think partly it’s just time - months and months of wanting one thing and getting something else, and the marvellous adaptivity of the human psyche. It’s as if my system has learnt to say, okay - it seems you’re not in control of this after all. How can we support you to feel alright anyway?

There’s also a strong spiritual element to this change. I have done an awful lot of offering my troubles up to the Buddha. This surrendering was from necessity - during the worst of my railing-against-reality, it was the only thing available to me. I have also, as recommended by Tosha Silver, been praying for things to unfold in the way that they are meant to, with the highest good for all involved. What if it already was?

This experience of not getting what I want has shown me afresh the limits of my agency and my competency. It’s punctured the bubble of my certainty that I know what’s best. Hanging out with the reality of these limits, as painful as it is, has offered me an opportunity to look beyond them. To not look through the eyes of my many self-protective and manipulative parts, but through the eyes of calm, all-accepting Self. To take deeper refuge in the three jewels. To feel, somehow, that through all these ups and downs there is something that holds me safe and wishes me well.

I am not suggesting for one minute that you ought to be feeling grateful for your own Difficult Things. If you’d suggested this to me, even a few weeks ago, I would have needed to restrain myself from swearing very loudly at you.

I don’t think we can rush the transmogrification of Difficult Things into gifts, however much we’d like to. I think that when we’re in the shit we need buckets of empathy and oodles of gentleness. Bad stuff happens. Injustice abounds. Adding an extra layer of ought to all the other horribleness when we’re going through difficulties (“I really should see this as an opportunity, I really should find the hidden treasure”) is the opposite of what I’m suggesting. If things are hard for you right now, that sucks and I hate it. Sometimes it’s true that there are no silver linings.

What I am sharing is that sometimes, after months or years or decades, we do begin to see glints of treasure in the darkest of our times. We find that, afterwards, we feel more tenderness towards others. We see that our troubles gifted us the ability to finally speak up for ourselves. We see that by showing us our edges they encouraged us into the arms of something vast, wise and loving.

In my case: I can see that I was right to want to change my life, but that I didn’t and still don’t know exactly when or how. This doesn’t mean I become passive, but it does mean that I tune into when it’s appropriate to take action, and when I just need to wait, watch and wonder. I’m fascinated to find out what will happen next!

Sometimes, as Roethke says, “In a dark time, the eye begins to see.”

Wishing you comfort in your darkness. Wishing you an eye that begins to see.

Go gently,
Satya <3