During the first week after Mom’s diagnosis, I remembered a quote I’ve held onto since I first heard it.
“In difficult times carry something beautiful in your heart.”
—Blaise Pascal
I think there’s a reason you remember certain quotes or sayings. They strike you for some reason, sometimes known, oftentimes unknown. Reappearing at sporadic moments throughout your life like an old friend. Though you’ve changed, they still meet you where you are.
This brings up a lot for me at the moment. I think of life and how much uncertainty lies ahead. Not just with my own path, but Mom’s too. With cancer now in the picture, the threads interweaving our lives threaten to tear apart earlier than anyone could’ve predicted. Will she be here to see me into midlife? Or will her own experience of it end?
Holding that question brings up sadness. A sadness that bubbles up fondness and leads me to reach for photos tucked in cheesy frames. Staring at them, I see why pictures are worth a thousand words — so often more.
I shared a photo last week of Mom, K, and I during her birthday in 2003. I only recently realized Dad must be behind the camera. Smiling, I’m certain.
In that moment, everything is perfect. There’s so much life, so much love. Joy. Laughter. While the drama of growing up would arrive eventually, it held off on knocking, lingering at the door. Allowing us to bask in our moment of blissful ignorance of what was to come.
It’s the most beautiful image of our family I know — one I carry in my heart during these times.
When I look at this photo, I also see all the countless iterations that four-year-old boy would undergo over the years. Periods of expansion followed closely by contraction. Expansion. Contraction. On and on.
The more he iterated, the further he’d retreat from himself and his truth. I don’t blame him, he did what he needed to survive. Even if that meant crafting and believing a story he was broken and needed fixing. That he needed to be perfect to be worthy of love and connection.
I flip through the “successes” he’d have as I would an old photo album. Only able to stand by knowing how the story would eventually unfold. How necessary pain was for his transformation. How he needed to lose himself to realize what’d been here, who’d been here, all along.
While my story is unique, it also isn’t. Pain followed by transformation. Expansion followed by contraction. An ebb then a flow. It’s all part of being human.
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My life these past few years has felt like a lab experiment. Running out into the world, falling on my face, having my beliefs and assumptions shattered, then furiously scribbling down my observations and reflections for the next iteration. Slowly unraveling the thread of who I am. Who all of us are when the knots are undone.
I’m at this stage now where I believe, I know, there’s no limit to my potential. I may not see who I’ll be, but I feel my horizons expanding without any end in sight.
This is the difficult part of transformation, especially during the earlier iterations. We’re so conditioned to live from our heads that we’ve lost touch with the intelligences within us that are our dream and visionary factories.
We stop believing in what can’t be seen.
You could say we’ve lost our faith, not in a religion or God-like figure, but in ourselves. With how disoriented we’ve become, it’s a mess trying to move forward. Where exactly are we going? What point is there in going on?
With so many knots in your head, every step is a leap into the unknown. Toward some faint glimmer up ahead, even as you’re clouded in darkness.
What if the light isn’t actually over there, but right here?
Despite the doubt and uncertainty, despite feeling you’ve been abandoned, a more evolved “You” is waiting for you, just out of your field of view. Your mind may not know where you’re going, but You does. Tracking your path and lighting the way. Meeting you where you are. As You always has, and always will.
At every step along the way, your potential is unfolding. Beauty and wholeness present within you as you are. Not when you become “someone” in the next iteration, but here, now.
How different would our individual and collective struggles be? Knowing they’re necessary for our healing and transformation. That who we are now, in this moment and the next, is the beauty we’ve carried in our hearts all along.
Read it.
Feel you.
My question is about what is “beautiful?”
Trungpa Rinpoche said that the common idea about perfect, love, beautiful (especially in The West culture) is false, surface, unreal.
Let’s take a trip together looking at that.
Truth is here. Same for beauty, love, perfection.
What does this mean?
Just starting to read your heart/this piece Dennis.
Here with you.
More, more, soon…
🙏🏼