Years ago, I was asked how it was that I was so prolific in my writing.
"Other things suffer," I said.
As I write these words there are other things I'm not doing. In saying 'yes' to writing this, I am saying 'no' to them.
It's the most honest answer most of us can give about how we've created such beauty in areas of our lives.
"How did you create such a remarkable business?"
"How did you make your marriage work?"
"How is your health so good?"
"How did you manage to live off grid on such a small budget?"
Other things suffered.
We said 'no' to social events, relationships that mattered languished and faded because this other thing mattered more.
There's a lot of heartbreak in all this when you stop and count the costs. Not that it's not been worth it (it often has but the hypothetical math often ends up in an internal division we didn't count on when we tried to add things up).
We look back and think, "I could have done so much more."
But we couldn't have. We could only have done different things. We could have slept less but this would likely have cost our health and shortened our life.
There it is, waiting for you on the pillow you resist allowing your head to rest on: everything you didn't do that day. And so you stay up later trying to do one more thing on your phone before sleep, fitful because you pushed yourself again, claims you. And so your sleep suffers and your health suffers.
As you get older you realize, and there's nothing but defeat in this, that most of life involves saying, 'no' while wishing you could say 'yes'; having a heart full of desires your body can't fulfill.
Other things suffered.
So many things went unsaid and undone as you went about planting and watering the most fragrant and colourful flowers you could find, as many pots as you can fit on your little apartment balcony to answer the immense ugliness that has grown in the concrete-laden, constantly lit, machine of a city. You wish you could do more but even this little garden, loved and spoken to in the in between moments wrestled from the grips of the hustle and grinding down of urban life takes more time than you have to give.
And so you make bouquets. Little bundles of these little proud ones so insistent on being beautiful.
The string you used to tie them together is made from your willingness to say 'no' and to tie the bow on what you have, signaling the end of everything that could have been. That string means you stop adding flowers.
That string turns so many potentials into impossibilities for the sake of this one, actual, incarnated thing, these ragged little bouquets you're offering up to the world hoping the world, or someone in it, might find them beautiful and worthy too.
Each flower required food and water to grow that other plants didn’t get. Each flower is a sign of those people and places, the projects and purposes that were on the receiving end of the sunlight of your limited attention and energy. It’s what you’re left with in the end. There were so many other things you wished you could have done. There were so many other flowers you wished you could include on your balcony but you ran out of room.
"How did you learn how to be so wise?"
"Other people suffered," is an honest answer.
We do most of our learning on other people's backs. All the one's who put up with our learning times, who bore the brunt of our dysfunctions and were kind enough to let us know about... they suffered so that we could learn (gestures broadly at parenting and efforts at community building).
"How did that food come to be on your plate today?"
"Other ones suffered," you say, hoping they didn't suffer too much so that you could eat today. You think of the animals who gave themselves up or whose lives were taken so you could eat. You think of the seeds that died so your food could be born. You think of the labour pains of the Earth to give birth to life every Spring. All of which your life depends on. None of which depends on you.
There are limits and endings everywhere you look.
All the noble causes that deserve labour that you can't give.
All the friends who deserve time from you that you can't give.
All those parts of yourself that could use more love than you've been able to find time for.
Other things suffer.
I think of the grandmothers and grandfathers who carry their communities on their backs, the parents who suffer raising children in a crater where a village used to be.
There's no way off of the meat hook of this. Whatever we do and don't do leaves a hole somewhere where we might have been and, most certainly, where we have been.
The practice of ‘leave no trace’ evaporates in the face of all this. There’s always a trace.
No matter what diet you eat, other things suffer.
No matter how you clothe yourself, something died so you could wear that.
No matter what you built your home from, there's a hole where those materials used to be.
Other things suffer.
The more you see it, the more beauty you try to make, to feed what's been feeding you all along, and what's been starving you all along.
The more you see the cost of your life on the world and all those in it and suffer yourself, the more you want to give voice to what you see in a dawn chorus on thank yous offered up to everything and everyone who got you here and everyone you wanted to help but couldn’t.
What does all the suffering mean?
Too soon to tell.
How we live our lives, every day, is the unfolding meaning of those things. A human can do their best to live redemptively, to make beauty of all that cost so that, upon looking back, it becomes harder and harder to say, "I wish we hadn't had to suffer" because, look at the beauty that came from it.
Living for this kind of redemption is a confounding of the senses, a baffling of the easy meaning making of this binary-coded cultureless catastrophe we've inherited.
After all, lest we get loss in the atomizing black hole of shame, it’s good to remember that we suffer too as a result of the choices of others. And so why not try to redeem that while we're busy?
And then you see it. Everyone who ever helped you, all the hands that met yours in the night, everyone who lit a candle and poured you another cup of tea to replenish you from the tears you'd wept and might yet weep, anyone who ever minded your children when you couldn't, who made you something with their hands, who paid for a meal, who helped you build something you couldn't have built yourself... other things suffered so they could be there with you, offering what they offered. Other ones were covering for them so they could be there for you.
The algebra of these costs is supposed to break your heart. It's not supposed to add shame but to subtract it. Done well, it's the ending of every grievance you ever nursed and the beginning of a bottomless well of gratitude that has to find its life in the making of beauty.
Other things suffered.
That might be the story of this world.
Learning that story faithfully is the beginning of you planting and tending to your flowers.
Telling that story is you offering those bouquets to the world.
That string says, “I tried.”
Your willingness to do this leaves a perfume in the air and the memory of the sight of that outrageous, unlikely balcony, a cacophony of colour across the humdrum apartment wall of modernity.
Future generations might catch what remains of the scent or hear a story from an old man saying, "I remember the most beautiful scent as I was walking on that trail when I was a young man. I followed it and someone had left a little bouquet, a little altar of flowers there." And they might follow that to where one of your bouquets was laid down so long ago. The string might be all that’s left after nature has had its way with those proud ones he held together. But the string is the thing.
Maybe it will have its consequences on them, chiefly that those unwelcome and hard on the furniture house guests of guilt, shame and self-hatred for being human, themselves, begin to suffer.
Those to come might have their own consequence begin to register on them and their conscience begin to emerge having found this rare trace of something human in a world with so little humanity.
And any grievance-filled entitlement they’ve been cradling? That might suffer most of all.
Those to come might find that withered bouquet, slip off the string of whatever remains of the roses, tulips and tiger lilies that once adorned your balcony and tie it around their wrist like a rosary of how it all came to be and a testimony to the give a shit and willingness to try of those who came before, itself binding together the generations of those who suffered so that those to come might have some food and beauty on the table.
That string might be the only sign they ever get of kinship with ancestors worth coming from and the beginning of them becoming one themselves.
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This is beautiful, once again. I am glad you have come to explicitly share your philosophies and perspectives on life. Your wisdom often leaked through your teachings on Marketing and was one of the reasons why I became part of that community. My heart smiles knowing your wisdom has a place to shine of its own light now.
This post reminds me of interactions I had with two of my kids, both as they leaned into adulthood, and were struggling to shed the last remnants of childhood and take their place as contributing members of society.
My middle daughter says "mom... Dad... It just hit me, a huge error I had made in understanding... You raised me ensuring I could do anything I wanted... and I thought that meant I could do EVERYTHING I wanted... <<tears in her eyes>> I am just realizing I can't!"
My middle son, true to his form of as few words as possible, once shared an insight with me in his late teens, early 20's, that shook me for a few years as I assimilated it. "Dad, its clear to me... There is no (true) choice without sacrifice".
Both these resonate deeply for me again as I connect to the words you have shared here. Thanks again.
It nourishes me to read you here, Tad. This idea bears much truth. And it’s the biggest lesson I took from having cancer. Infinite growth without natural limits destroys its host. Looking at how we are ravaging the planet, I see how that insatiable desire can destroy much around us though nature will go on and we might perish if we don’t heed this basic law soon enough.