DISCOMFORT IS THE DOORWAY
The most trustworthy people in the world are those who have been to the underworld. Those who’ve been torn open, rearranged, and made new by suffering.
I wish someone had told me when I was a kid that I was going to suffer. Not only that I was going to suffer but that I must suffer. That this was inevitable, non-negotiable, and in fact a requirement for a life well-lived.
What I mean by “suffering” is the tough stuff, the aspects of life we’d rather avoid: pain, discomfort, heartbreak, grief, discontent, impatience, boredom, frustration, anger, fear.
“We just want you to be happy” was an oft-repeated phrase in my house growing up. I know I’m not alone in this. A parent’s wish for their child’s happiness is certainly understandable. But I’ve come to see it as not all that helpful as it elevates “happiness” above other emotions. It declares happiness to be supreme, the most coveted of states. And it trains one to think that when one is not happy something must be terribly wrong.
If a parent has tasted some real darkness or dysfunction in their own childhood—or even seen quite clearly how merciless and unsparing the world can be—it’s only natural for them to want to protect their own children ferociously. I imagine it’s a special kind of heartbreak to let your kid loose in a world that you fear will grind her underfoot.
American culture insists there is some secret formula, some mystical combination of money, success, love, luxury, status, fame, and/or material possessions that will inoculate us against despair, hurt, and loss. We’re inundated with advertisements every single day whose underlying message is always some version of: You’re not happy (we know it). But you could be… if you bought this car, went on this vacation, drank this beer.
“The pursuit of happiness” is a darkly good business model because the chase is endless. It’s a treatment not a cure, a pill you have to take every day for the rest of your life. The ennui might be abated for a short time after each purchase or experience but it inevitably returns. Often with more force than it possessed before.
I’ve touched many of those spaces and none of them have brought me to the promised land of sustainable happiness. And when I start thinking maybe “more” is what I need I think about people I know who have infinitely “more” and seem infinitely more despairing.
Only King Solomon (the wealthiest man in the world) could write a document as pitilessly cynical as Ecclesiastes. (“Meaningless! Meaningless! Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.”) The punchline of course is that that’s not quite true. But what we’re looking for, says the writer, is not to be found in the things of this world, which inevitably rise up and fall away, over and over and over.
When I see an influencer peddling a “perfect life” and endless tips and tricks on how I, too, can attain and sustain such a life, I cannot run fast enough in the other direction. I’m finding “perfection” to be more and more repellent the older I get. I need to see the cracks, the strain, the wounds, the vulnerability, the humanity.
The most trustworthy people in the world are those who have been to the underworld. Those who’ve been torn open, rearranged, and made new by suffering. Myths are riddled with descents into the underworld wherein the hero confronts the darkness of the shadowy depths and reemerges with gifts and lessons. This is a kind of wisdom that is not on offer in the clouds or on earth. It can only be found below.
A voice that I deeply trust and treasure these days is that of Nick Cave. His Red Hand Files – a weekly email where he answers questions from fans – is reliably the best thing I read each week. (Sign up, they’re free!)
For those who don’t know Nick Cave is an Australian musician who has, since 1983, fronted the band Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds. His long presence on the music scene has turned him into a kind of post-punk elder statesman. But his life has been riddled with tragedy. Cave was a heroin addict for twenty years before getting sober. His fifteen-year-old son Arthur died in 2015 and seven years later another son, Jethro, died.
Despite all this, his writing is suffused with warmth, humor, and wisdom. Here’s Cave in a recent Red Hand File:
“I do my best to move through life with a joy that is reconciled to the sorrow of things but is not subsumed by it, that apprehends darkness and is not afraid of it. I try to receive some form of salvation in this life by paying witness to, and being lifted by, the great, uncontested value of existence. I feel duty-bound to unearth, enhance and promote the world's beautiful things rather than obsess, worry and agitate over the worst of things. I believe in creation over destruction, compassion over cynicism, mercy over vitriol, friendship over hostility, truth over lies and love over hate.”
Amen to that!
I trust Cave’s prophetic words because they’ve been forged in the fire of tragedy. He had every excuse in the world to turn callous, bitter, and cynical. To retreat and shut down and howl in rage at the hand he’d been dealt. But he went another way. He let his grief tenderize him, to soften rather than harden him. And because of that decision (which, I’m sure, requires ongoing daily surrender) he has helped countless people find solace and meaning in their grief.
The kind of wisdom that Nick Cave dispenses in The Red Hand Files and in a glorious of book of interviews with the Irish journalist Sean O’Hagan called Faith, Hope, and Carnage simply doesn’t spring forth from people who are ‘happy’ all the time. Happy-all-the-time people, in my experience, are engaged in a heroic amount of shadow denial. And it’s only a matter of time before the dam bursts.
I’m not saying happiness is to be avoided. No! When it arrives, my god, please seize upon it and enjoy the hell out of it. But to expect it to stick around forever is naïve at best and dangerous at worst. Happiness is fleeting, inherently unsustainable. As a goal, the “happiness” game is rigged to defeat us. Life is too replete with everything else. Saying you only want one aspect of it is a recipe for suffering.
The good news is that life takes care of all of this for us. No one is spared, no matter how ferociously over-protected and bubble-wrapped or self-deluding they might be.
“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and being alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You have to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes too near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.”
—Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum.
****
I’ve had to a ton of remedial work in this area, to undo a kind of Pollyanna-ism in myself, this naïve expectation that the world should coalesce around my desires and deliver some kind of sustained unbreakable joy. I’ve had to learn that no feeling is final. Not happiness, not sorrow, not anger, not grief, not boredom. That resilience is preferable to safety and one cannot acquire resilience without risk and stumbling. That discomfort is the doorway one must pass through to arrive anywhere meaningful.
The great tragedy of life will not be the difficult, challenging, and terrible things that happen to us (those are inevitable). The great tragedy is emerging on the other side of those things absent more meaning, resolve, inner fortitude, and empathy.
As I’ve reread what I’ve written here a voice in my head keeps saying that I’ve written this piece before. That this is nothing new. The voice is correct: I have written it before. And I’ll surely write it again. For me, it’s the great theme, the reminder I can’t hear enough. It’s actually why I write: To make sense of suffering. To give it context and meaning. To do the great alchemical trick: converting the lead of hardship into the gold of wisdom.
I once heard a woman say a beautiful thing after an ayahuasca ceremony. She said she realized that the earth does not want our emotions to go unexpressed. We must work through where we are blocked, express ourselves, and shed our tears. The shedding of those tears is essential because the earth needs them, for it is our tears that water the parched earth. Once we’ve cried, once we’ve watered the earth with our tears, what we are left with is stories. And from our stories come wisdom.
Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s new novel Long Island Compromise is wildly funny, tragic, and wonderful. This piece she wrote for the NYT Magazine is very special: “The Kidnapping I Can’t Escape.”
I just finished and loved Hanif Abdurraqib’s new book, There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension and I also loved this profile of him in The Guardian.
I tore through Kaveh Akbar’s book Martyr on my honeymoon. It’s terrific.
Michael Schulman’s interview with Jonathan Groff is a delight. And another Schulman interview that moved me: “How Mark Duplass Fights The Sadness.”
This dance by CDK company sent me somewhere. I was sad to come back down.
The first volume of my double album Eulogy came out late last year. If you’d like a copy on vinyl you can grab that here. I spent an afternoon with The New Yorker’s Amanda Petrusich in Green-Wood Cemetery talking life, death, and music. Here’s a feature in American Songwriter by Katherine Yeske Taylor. NPR’s Weekend Edition did a lovely piece on me and the album. And EW, Paste, and People premiered the first three singles, “Red,” “NYC,” and “Learning.”
“Damien Rice’s ‘O’ Turns 20” (awhile back but this is still a fun read if, like me, this album is an all-timer for you) By Rachel Brodsky
A fantastic piece by Gideon Jacobs in the NYTimes: “A.I. Is The Future of Photography. Does That Mean Photography Is Dead?”
“What Deathbed Visions Teach Us About Living”: Researchers are documenting a phenomenon that seems to help the dying, as well as those they leave behind. By Phoebe Zerwick.
“How I Met Your Mother” is back on Netflix and EW ranked their top 50 episodes.
“A Poem That’s Like a Perfect First Date” (a close reading of Frank O’Hara’s ‘Having a Coke With You.’) By A.O. Scott
“Miranda July Turns The Lights On” by Alexandra Schwartz.
“The Art of Survival”: In living with cancer, Suleika Jaouad has learned to wrench meaning from our short time on earth. By Jennifer Senior.
“Jonathan Haidt Wants to Take Away Your Kids’ Phone” by David Remnick.
One of my favorite poems: “Happiness” by Jane Kenyon.
Thank you. This was a good reminder that nothing is permanent, including sadness.
Just what I needed this morning.