Hi,
How are you this week? What do you see in a corner of your heart?
I’ve returned to Poland now, after a month in Portugal. Here, I’m made busy sorting through the stack of unexpected events, hoping to make sense of it all. Meanwhile, I hold space for the multitude of emotions that ask for recognition. In the corner of my heart, a little face of fear cautiously peeks out. It looks at me, and I look back, and we acknowledge each other's presence.
I know. This isn't the kind of start to a letter that brings excitement. We've grown used to celebrating successes, rarely sharing the weight of our struggles. Yet, if I can choose — and in writing this, I do — I prefer not to follow the path of only discussing the smooth and pretty. It doesn't seem fair, not to the community, nor to the one sharing.
Why not be open about the whole of life? It treats each of us equally: it offers and it takes; it binds and it dissects; it answers some only to question most of it again. And we, humans, are submerged in this soup of half-cooked, constant happening. Hurdles do pass eventually, but what’s the use of pretending they never came in the first place? That serves no one.
Would it not be kind to embrace life in its entirety, to stand in our truth just as we are, with all its complexities? That’s what life asks of us — to eat it whole, just where we stand.
This story is, of course, not mine alone. In every heart, there's a gaze of fearful sorrow, a longing for understanding that binds us, one to another, in the vastness of our shared vulnerability. Even in our solitude, in the midst of our struggles, we reflect a larger truth about being human: our profound need for connection and the healing power of a warm, communal embrace.
As I write this, I am reminded of a movie I had watched some time ago, and especially, a video essay that tends to a subtle theme in it: the lost art of grief.
Terrence Malick in “The New World” takes on the old and complex story of Pocahontas, her land and the people inhabiting it, but does so in a beautiful and poetic manner. The nuances of the story are, as I suppose, known to most, so let us leave them aside in this letter, and focus once again on the theme I had mentioned.
I am sure that you, too, can recall moments when you had felt isolated and confined in the cold and dark chest of your sorrow. At times, it might have indeed evoked the longing for the ultimate end: of the pain, as well as the body and the mind bearing it, and causing. Unwelcome to the comfort of co-experiencing, we fall deeper, and more acutely, into the depths of our darkness.
I had always found it difficult to understand why, and how, a person can turn away from their kin seeing them in struggle and aching. But soon enough, I understood that a single human being is incapable of comprehending and embracing the entirety of sorrow our world appears engorged with. Since each of us is forced to carry the weight of our struggles mostly unaided, our own glands are so swollen with it that we, alone, often struggle to make a move and offer relief to one another. We might be tempted to label this as insensitivity, but there is no use in judging — others or ourselves. It won’t help. Let us retrieve instead the way of being which is natural to our hearts, from which we, especially in the West, have drifted far.
Ever since I was little, the expectation was that I compartmentalise my emotions. There are those commonly accepted and welcomed, and those which I was taught to hide or suppress altogether. This compartmentalisation, as noted by Francis Weller in his book 'The Wild Edge of Sorrow', narrows the parameter of life experiences we allow ourselves to fully inhabit. Weller argues that such restrictions not only diminish our capacity to navigate sorrow and grief but also our ability to experience joy in its fullest form: “When we compress the terrain of grief, we also compress the territory of joy, and we end up living in a flatline culture, which is where we are right now.”
This is our shared cultural predicament: the loss of our full emotional breadth to societal norms that prize stoicism and forced positivity over genuine vulnerability. Not only we loose this part of ourselves, but it also leaves us unprepared to cope with the void that remains. According to Weller, “the proper response to that loss should be grief. But we typically hold these parts of us with judgement, and contempt. And we cannot grieve for something that we hold with judgement.” The antidote to this state would be, of course, to rewind the course of our cultural programming, and to hold our struggles in a collective embrace: “part of what our grief is waiting for is the village to show up. And the village can be small. If we have two or three people gathered to sit down and say: tonight, I want to tell you about my sorrow. And I want to hear all about your sorrow. And there's nothing broken. Nothing needs fixing. What we need is to have someone listen deeply to our sorrow and say: it matters,” Weller suggests.
The lost art of grief, of living through the hurdles, is meant to be a communal practice. An experience shared and worked upon, through togetherness, as Tom van der Linden, an author of the video essay, explained. However, I believe that to enable this togetherness, we must first gain the courage to be soft; and this is done best by retiring into the private chamber of ourselves.
Oftentimes, in the face of adversity, we feel the urge to toughen up — to protect ourselves and, by extension, shield all that we hold dear. Yet, this impulse is not necessarily in alignment with our nature — and, I suppose, it’s also at odds with the nature of the universal laws in general.
Even the biggest stones I came across at the beach are not immune to the force of external influences and they give into the natural process of change, called corrosion. Their bodies are firm and strong and yet there’s a certain quality of softness about them. Without it, they wouldn’t be able to hold their form under the pressure of environmental factors — they’d fall apart like dry and brittle skin falls off the body after it lost all of its lively flexibility. The stone obeys its nature, and that’s what ensures its survival. The process of corrosion changes its form over time, but it doesn’t break it down completely.
There might, of course, be instances when we need to stay strong and endure the testing moment with determination, but strength is not opposed to softness. As Khalil Gibran, a writer, poet and visual artist, said, “Tenderness and kindness are not signs of weakness and despair, but manifestations of strength and resolution.”
I often use the metaphor of a wall versus an open door. When our mind embodies a wall — rigid and unyielding — opposing forces will eventually break us down after repeated strikes. On the other hand, if we tried to become like an open door, we could allow all experiences to pass through freely in both directions, and our frame would remain unshaken.
When enduring hurdles, we invariably possess the natural ability to remain soft, and open. Instead of opposing the circumstances and the emotions they evoke in us, we can simply let them pass back and forth until all things set in disruptive motion slow down and the dust of fear, confusion, and sorrow settles. We can observe all of this fuss flowing in and out of our being, and we can understand there’s no need to do anything about it. We can simply let it be. Just like Francis Weller suggested, nothing needs fixing; there’s nothing broken; we just need to know that our sorrow matters. And while he meant the acknowledgement to happen in a group, however small, I believe it’s important that we first practice acknowledging in solitude. That is the job to be done in the private chamber of ourselves.
Giving in to our vulnerability, we are, in fact, only ever giving in to the natural way of living we were born into: the genuine, subtle, good-willed force that carries us through the thickening time. I don’t mean here the aspects we consider as our personality, views, culture or preferences. I mean the deep-rooted nature that’s woven into our genome, and that comes from our stone-age ancestors. The blood running in our veins bears the quality of softness and suppleness — not of force and opposition.
To resist doesn’t mean to oppose with rigidity. Resistance, although capable of taking various forms, including those associated with force and hostility, is, fundamentally, of a subtler nature. It’s yielding and flexible. It’s the stone’s response to the ceaseless environmental factors, enduring change rather than succumbing to it. And it’s the opening of our door, instead of looking for material to build a thicker wall. If the events passing through our door need to change something about us, it’ll be just like the corrosion of the stone — refining our shape — not destroying it.
The soft quality we possess, which is present in all natural forms, in all beings, is thus one which enables us to adapt, and to grow anew. It keeps us alive:
“Men are born soft and supple; dead they are stiff and hard. Plants are born tender and pliant; dead, they are brittle and dry. Thus whoever is stiff and inflexible is a disciple of death. Whoever is soft and yielding is a disciple of life. The hard and stiff will be broken. The soft and supple will prevail.”
— Lao Tzu
Once we come in contact with this soft quality of ours, we are better equipped to share it with others, and to welcome theirs. That’s the communal practice of holding and healing the grief. Let us invite Francis Weller into this argument once again. He reminds us that “Grief is not a problem to be solved, it’s a presence waiting for witnessing. It’s the solitary journey we cannot do alone, that needs to be shared. Only then can there be a response, a protection, a restoration of that which has been damaged.”
Unless we can accept that, we’re not softened into accepting ourselves, and we are unfit to embrace our lives; fighting our genuine nature, we fight life itself. Opening to our softness lets us connect with other beings. And it doesn’t have to solely benefit the self. Most of us are starved for warmth, care, and kindness, trapped in a constant search for a relief from our suffering — and so is any other being. By denying ourselves those soft qualities, we deny them to the world. Yearning to be held, let us learn to hold one another.
We might’ve lost the sense of supportive community, and the sweet luxury of letting our deepest, most painful emotional states be held by our kindred, yet what’s lost is not without the potential of restoration. We can, and I think, we should indeed make efforts to soften ourselves and to do it daily, until the last rigid wall is pried open, and the flow of all experiences, both blissful and sorrowful, can pass through all of our bodies at once, unimpeded. This is the strength of softness: it unities.
I long for a world where we let our nature act through us instead of suppressing it, where we remember that sorrow is not to be treated as a defect, a disability of an individual, but embraced and held with reverence by many warm and tender hands. Where we step outside, from between the walls, and once again let our softness wild and running — through the open door of our beings.
Question to you, dear reader:
How can you allow yourself to be soft today?