About gains and losses

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.”