Siphon Suffering

I’d like to highlight two headlines from December of 2019:

“The dumpster decade is over, 2020 is going to kickstart the best decade ever!”

“2019 you sucked, but I can see clearly that 2020 will be the best year ever!”

Let’s begin by just laughing really hard at how fantastically bonkers those sound. Next, let me say that I truly appreciate positivity and being optimistic, because we certainly could use more of it, correct? But to be honest, I often bristle when I hear how tomorrow or next week or next year is where greatness will be discovered or uncovered.

So it’s then, but not now? You think that this year is a dumpster fire. I get it … but I just can’t do it. So I have a proposal …

I’d like to take day two of Advent, this season of anticipating the universe altering with-ness of the Divine, to slip a siphon into the suffering of 2020.

Because the temptation is to skip over … to run around … or to plug our ears and close our eyes and start humming so as to drift off to the happy place of … tomorrow. Or 2021. At this point, both tomorrow and 2021 are simply theory. We have yesterday to learn from and today to walk in. So let’s use the language of “I just want to go back to …” as a guide to siphon the suffering of what was in order to expand what is.

Because we want to be people who don’t go around or jump over. We will sit in and sit with, allowing suffering to be our teacher. And this education can lead us to fully embrace the truth that suffering and love are actually dance partners, but we too often break them apart because we just want all the feels of love. But one without the other is like a a plane with one wing, which only leads to a free fall of spinning in circles, leaving us stumbling around in a dizzied stupor.

Love without suffering is like being born in your late twenties. I get the idea of skipping over middle school, because it was super awkward and our inner world functioned like leftover mashed potatoes that were lost in the back of the fridge. But we needed all that awkwardness and messiness to help us grow into who we are today. Trying to skip over the suffering and just get back to a romanticized yesteryear can be devastating to wisdom. Adam Duritz poetically offers us the truth of how love and suffering are intertwined with a lyric from the song Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby, “And the price of a memory is the memory of the sorrow it brings.” If a memory is like the softness of a pillow, then that pillow also carries the pain of invisible little pins that are stuck into the feathers or foam.

Spending even the smallest amount of time in public or looking at the train wreck that is social media reveals the jarring reality that too many people are living in the land of denial. If all of the chaos that has been thrown at us this year is to be our teacher, then we are currently in danger of flunking.

With a hunger for transcendence, we understand the siphon into suffering as more of a feeding tube for wisdom. We can try to jump the pain, but my hope is we will be a people who siphon the suffering in order to more fully live and give love.