There is no otherwise
When you work a muscle, you tear it. And that’s a good thing. Microtears alert the body to take action, sending nutrition-rich blood to the site. Fortified by sugar, protein, fat, minerals and vitamins, muscle cells go into repair and rebuild mode. Where there was a microtear, there is now new muscle tissue. This is how the body grows muscle. You have to break it down to grow it. You have to stress it to make it stronger.
Why am I writing about this? Good question.
Suppose resilience is a muscle? Suppose empathy is a muscle? Suppose compassion is a muscle? Obviously not literally, not anatomically. But you get my drift.
If those parts of us, wherever they exist, are not touched, taxed, stressed, torn, then maybe they don’t have the opportunity to get stronger. Maybe we don’t have the chance to grow into the highly resilient, deeply empathetic, sincerely compassionate people we could be.
This is how I am choosing to interpret the shitstorm that is sometimes life: That pain has purpose. And I am not talking about enduring pain and suffering to become closer to god. If I believed in god, I would not believe in an entity, a consciousness, a whatever, who would want us to endure pain and suffering to prove our worthiness.
When we are in the thick of it, it is hard to see beyond that. It is easy to fall into dark places. And to stay there too long. As the Girls sing: “Darkness has a hunger that's insatiable/ And lightness has a call that's hard to hear.”
I am not talking about me here. I am talking about us. I am talking about what we’ve been through, what we’re in the midst of, wildfires on the land, wildfires in our hearts. I am talking about Claudia and Susan, about Barbara, about Doug and Wille and Kaz, about those other folks whose stories I know but whose names I won’t tell.
After the fact, after the moment, we can think about the microtears. We can plumb the experience for meaning, create a narrative to make sense of it. Think, dream, breathe, write, hike our way through, imagine the building of new tissue, delight in the places that have grown. Because otherwise. Well, damn, there is no otherwise.
I am more comfortable quoting the Indigo Girls than Hemingway, but here is what Papa had to say: “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”