I occasionally see the way to live. The other day I was–in a dream–offering love and comfort to a black woman who had had a very hard life, with repeated traumas, and I was thinking that this energy, this love, is always there, but we hold back. From an early age, we are taught that to give someone is to get something, and we block our natural generosity if nothing is coming back to us. There is a tenderness we block.
Most of the time, what I think we want is recognition: we want people to see that we hurt too, or to acknowledge what wonderful people we are for giving our time and energy. If we can’t get someone to say “you’re so wonderful”, we don’t want to give; obviously, this would be implicit in people simply knowing what you do.
Yet, I felt an alternative, and felt simultaneous resistance to it. We all have our stories. We want to tell people our stories, to be seen, to be visible. I want to tell my story, to be seen.
But this path is short, and leads to death. The way forward is to forget who you are, what your sufferings have been, what your generosities have been, and to work patiently, daily, and as invisibly as you can to build a better world: to comfort those in pain, to encourage those doing things, and to live with as much personal congruence as you can muster.
It seems to me there is a limit to what you can take, but no limit to what you can give. That energy is infinite, provided it is not funnelled through a channel that has been unnecessarily reduced in size by your silliness.