And it would seem that we only have two options: we either deny this, and are surprised when the inevitable happens; or we fail to love at all. It seems to me the path of the Stoic is largely to suppress emotion, which helps avoid pain, but also suppresses joy.
As I heal, I feel faint whisps of hope, and I am very conscious how tender, how frail they are. It is like a small breeze blowing into the future, open, unsure, unclear. It is formless and changing.
And I feel how much more comforting in some respects are the certainties of despair. If you hope for disappointment and heart break, you surely will not be disappointed. You can make people hate you. You can be certain of feeling fear, and pain and grief.
And I wonder if the lust–as we say–for power is not really an emergent property of the need–the decision–to avoid pain? Power is of no use to any of us. What we really need is the presence of love, flowing in and out of us. What we call power-seeking may merely be the psychological artifice covering a life-long retreat from grief and lack of love. The logistics of power seeking occupy the mind, and the fact of power “outsources” as I have said the sense of pain.
I think this is close to the truth: Goodness is an emergent property of accepting and learning to process pain, and evil–power seeking–is an emergent property of avoiding pain.
But returning to the topic, I am increasingly conscious there is a much more interesting game: loving precisely BECAUSE it is evanescent, and deriving MORE joy from the fact that it will pass. What we clearly get from time to time are moments, and it seems to me that as my grief digestion system improves, I will be able to string more and more of them together. This is the task, the path, of wisdom.
This is the path of playing with Death, in the spirit of a child.