Breathtaking Beauty of Pain

[talon]

I wrote a poem with this title 7 or 8 years ago. The poem was about love, about knowing when to cleave and when to relinquish, about knowing who owns a problem, and about support even when that support is painful.

It's a lesson I learned early and several times over.

Sometimes, the best thing we can do for others is to step out of the way and be there when they return. Sometimes, engaging in drama with someone who has a problem (mid-life crisis, career doubts, friendship issues...) only makes things worse and drives the other person away. Stepping back, saying, "This is not my problem. I'll be here for you when you've worked it out" is the better thing to do. Engaging with the person to "talk it through" or to "discuss the issue" can often make matters worse. It adds pain and it causes fights.

We live in a society that thinks we have to fight for and over everything, and we don't.

We don't have to confront every person we think has hurt us and make them hurt, too. We don't have to argue over every little perceived slight or insult. It really isn't all about me. Sometimes, it has nothing to do with "me" and everything to do with what's happening inside the other person. We don't have to take everything personally, even when it's meant personally.

It's like having teenagers - they shout and scream "I hate you!" and at that moment in time, they do. But in the bigger picture, in all of life, very often they don't really hate you. If you engage them in that moment and argue with them, does anything get any better?

No.

What happens is you both get hurt, the teen slams into their room and you're left feeling lost, hopeless, angry, and very frustrated.

People say all kinds of things in the heat of the moment or when they are going through a stressful period . They don't always mean what they say, sometimes it's just projecting their inner worries onto those about them. When you've been friends with someone long enough, you know what to take at face value and what not to, so you can ignore the hurtful things that are said and look beneath them to the pain that caused them to say it.

This isn't to say it isn't hurtful to hear those things - it most certainly is. But sometimes, giving the other space to work out what's hurting them leads to a stronger friendship later.

Part of the problem is that relationships are not built on sacrifice and obligation and work any more, they are built on feel-good fantasies of romance and happiness ever after.

Whether your relationship is marriage or friendship, it's more than a selfish and egotistical feel-good, good-times-only commitment that one can walk away from at any time. It's a thick-and-thin, happy/sad, hard/easy, frustrating/comforting till-death-do-you-part relationship.

I know some people thing we should deeply involve ourselves in every aspect of our friends' lives, controlling them and dispensing advice and chastising them, trying to mold them into "better" people.

I think we should love them as they are and let them decide for themselves who they are and what they want to be. Our job - as friends, lovers, spouses - is to accept them and love them as they are and as they choose to change to be. Sometimes, when they tell you they don't love you anymore, they're leaving, it isn't entirely true. It's more likely they don't the place they are in right then and they see you as part of the problem. Truth is, even though they may believe you are part of the problem or even the problem itself, that may not be so. It's more likely that the problem isn't between the two of you, but something else in the other person's life.

I've kept friends when they've told me this because I didn't go all drama-queen on them and blow it all up into a large argument. What I did was tell them I didn't buy that they didn't love me anymore, and then I let them figure out what the real problem was. It usually took months (and in one case, years), but because I didn't make a fuss or lay guilt trips on them, it was easy for them to come back into my life when they were ready. We hadn't burned any bridges between us and we didn't have a huge argument to apologize for. We had a simple agreement that it wasn't my problem, it was theirs to fix and I'd be there with an open heart when they chose to return.

They always came back.

I can honestly say everyone with whom I have ever been a friend is still a friend today - some of those relationships have lasted more than 5 decades, those that have truly ended have done so through death, and even my spouse is still a friend who stayed involved in the lives of his children so they never felt the sting of our divorce. This year marks our 33rd anniversary as friends; we were married for 12 of those years.

Relationships last through the bad times as well as the good - through depression, loss, emotional and financial upsets, illness, and minor and major obsessions as well as the parties, the vacations, the shopping expeditions, the hunting trips, and all the other joys and pleasures of life. We get to know our friends, how they act, what their core values are, and when they tell us they don't love us anymore, our hearts know better.

So many people simply stop talking to their friends when they reach a crisis, whether it's an internal one or one caused by external stresses, because they feel they will be judged, or there will be some major argument, or they'll be made to feel guilty. Then, when they later realize they truly do love this person they've stopped talking to, they have no way to return. They don't even have an argument to apologize over.

I find that saddest of all.

If you at the very least tell a friend, "I'm not made of love right now. Will you wait for me?" you have some way to return and resume your friendship. (Or, if you're a teen and scream "I hate you!" at the top of your lungs and slam the door on the way out, at least you can come back with an "I'm sorry I yelled and slammed the door." And that opens the way to either picking up and moving forward or to explanations - teens aren't big on explanations, so moving forward works best.)

Distance can make a friendship fade. Our society is so mobile that even with social networks and websites and email, it's hard to maintain a deep friendship. What these tools do is keep the possibilities open, maintain connections, and if the conditions are right, allow a shallow friendship to blossom into a deep one.

I don't believe in severing connections, however tenuous, for that reason. Before the internet, I spent a lot of money on postage and the occasional phone call. Post-internet, I pay for a faster connection and for better privileges in a few social networks so I can keep up those connections better than cards, letters, and phone calls ever could.

Friendship isn't all about "me", it's about "us" - and that means we have to consider the needs of the other person, too. If that occasionally means subordinating our needs to help our friend, or to suffer as they appear to abandon us for a while, that's where the breathtaking beauty of pain comes in - our friendships are stronger and more enduring for it. We pass through that suffering, those sacrifices, and emerge loved.