She’s on his mind again. Random things
bring her back to life. This time it was the memory of her touch, the only
touch which could soothe his troubled mind and bless the tired wretched being
with liberating sleep. Tears are welling up the eyes once again.
Universe has surprising ways to combine the greatest pains with joy.
In very tight sequences as if life worked on a swing principle. It makes me
think of gains and losses of my life, and how they correlate.
Becoming a Canadian Permanent Resident is a dream coming true. And a
big and wild one too. For somebody who left his country just after turning 19
with one way train ticket to the Unknown deep in the pocket, lots of
determination and not much money as trip companions, mum’s tears on the
platform getting invisible as the train slowly pulls away from the safety net
of home territory, making a final and irreversible full stop behind my
adolescence; for somebody whose upcoming years will be all about losses and
gains, having a place which can be called and feels at least a bit like home,
is indeed a big deal.
Dad’s waving arm vanishes long after mum’s crying bright grey-blue
eyes. Mine shine with tears as well, but I fight them back. I had no clue back
then. No idea how many years will pass and what’s in the store for this
foolishly adventurous 19 years old boy. And his mother with eyes she stole from
our husky dog.
If there is one thing which can walk out undamaged from physical and
mental abuse stretching over such a long period, it is indeed a determined
human mind in healthy young body. When your present is so painful, that the
thought of next hour is filled with longing for brighter future, tomorrow is a
dream and next week, let alone next month, is something so unreal and aloof that
you entertain your mind with such fantasies only during the rare moments of
solitude, which unfold usually in the silence of night or early morning guard
shifts. Yet, when the suffering does not have an end, the illusion of future is
the only escape, the only way how to keep your sanity. Time stretches; it
lengthens and thins as little piece of butter spread over a mile long baguette,
because when you suffer without knowing when it will end, a second lasts an
hour, and a week lasts one year. And you know instantly that Einstein was dead
right with his relativity.
“Life’s a big game so you gotta play it with big boys”, sings Coolio
in my ears as I put these lines down. How matching! I shared endless years with
big boys, raving mad big tough boys, some of them bigger than our pitiful life.
And when they got outta that game, the outside world caught up with them and living it was like wearing a
shirt made of sand paper. Unbearable. Because their mind lost the ability to
flex, to adapt.
And that leads me to mention an important revelation, which dawned
on me through pain. An understanding which is always linked to suffering. The
relationship between sorrow and joy, the connection between gains and losses. You
can read about it hundred times and concur, but until you live it, you’ll never
really know. Any hardship is a spring board, a take-off platform, a fertile
seeding soil, an opportunity for future joy. Anybody knows that coffee tastes
better after a sleepless night, that warm shower feels like heaven after a day
spent in freezing wind, what a wonderful flower blossoms in your heart when
somebody smiles at you after walking through land of people who don’t smile,
what delightful feeling brings the touch of sun on your face after weeks of
rain. It makes you appreciate the things you took for granted, it makes you
concentrate on your gains and forget your losses.
But what if the hard times don’t last for just few hours? What if
they stretch over months and years, like an endless swamp you just can’t find your
way out of? What if the suffering is more intense than cold rain, wet shoes or
one miserable night? What if you are chained and whipped and given no hope, no
love, no understanding? Then you need one more ingredient to make it out
unblemished. It is flexibility. The flexibility of mind, the flexibility of
choice. You need to lubricate your perception of reality so it can squeeze out
of that pain and see it from the position of observer, from outside of the
hard-edged cube, which allows you to take a free decision even in the most
confined and long lasting circumstances. Flexibility which mollifies your heart
so when the axes gash it, it still hurts, but they don’t chip it, they don’t
inflict incurable wounds which turn into ugly scars.
So when you’re in pain and all that comes next is more pain, my dear
friend, give your beautiful mind that liberating unction, until it becomes so
smooth and flexible, that on the day when you walk out of that raging blizzard
into a kiss of a sunny spring day, and that day will come, you can walk it
upright and with a smile, not crooked and bitter. That flexibility of observer
will not make you forget, but it will make you forgive, so that you won’t look
over your shoulder and around every corner with worried anticipation of past shadows,
but with gratefulness and joy in your heart. On that day you will realize that
losses and gains cohabit the same existence, they’re sides of the same coin,
and one cannot be fully understood and enjoyed without the other. All you need
is enough flexibility in your thumb to flip the coin over.
Nobody could describe it better than Shantaram. I know I spoke way
too long already, but let me read what the man who lived and wrote the greatest
story of last century has to say about pain and choices. Haven’t read Shantaram
yet? You better do it. This master piece will open your eyes, and it will open
your heart.
“IT TOOK ME a long time and most of the world to learn what I
know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to
me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured. I realised,
somehow, through the screaming in my mind, that even in that shackled, bloody
helplessness, I was still free: free to hate the men who were torturing me, or
to forgive them. It doesn't sound like much, I know. But in the flinch and bite
of the chain, when it's all you've got, that freedom is a universe of
possibility. And the choice you make, between hating and forgiving, can become
the story of your life.”
