The Paradox of Living - Efforting into Effortlessness

8 years ago, I kept a blog.  I started it pretty soon after the first miscarriage and blogged our journey through fertility treatments.  The purpose of that blog was to be an outlet for me, a place to keep our friends and family up to date, and a place to share my experience with others who were in the same boat.  But the purpose of this blog is to share my experience, lessons, and perspective 8 years later.  Many things have happened since that time.  I have journaled and written through it all but feel that I have just now rediscovered my voice.  Or perhaps discovered, for the first time, a new voice.  A voice that owns my story but knows it doesn't define me.  A voice that can take the experience and shine on it the light of perspective.
Tucked away in the bottom drawer of my dresser, you would find a plain white box with the words "Always and Forever" stamped on it.  You'd find the box next to a shoebox full of pictures from my childhood and beneath a pale blue Guauyabera shirt that used to belong to my Papaw.  If you opened the box, you'd find a photograph of my husband’s face the moment I told him I was pregnant for the first time.  After we lost the baby, my mom had the photo printed and laminated and placed it inside the box. She hesitated to give it to me but ultimately decided that one day, I would need that memento to go back to. She was right.  I look at it only every so often including tonight as I write this. 

Only 3 short weeks after finding out we were pregnant, as we were getting dressed to go to Christmas dinner with my in laws, the world stopped.  Driving to the emergency room, I was certain that they would be able to help us.  I’m a planner and am typically “on top of things,” so it made sense to me that if I remained calm and didn’t waste any time, surely something could be done.  In the ER, the nurses performed an ultrasound, and it was then that I became certain that all my years of planning and making good choices would pay off because there, in the middle of the screen, was the tiniest but most beautiful little blinking light I’d ever seen.  It was December 23, 2010.  I was sent home hopeful that come Monday, when we saw our regular doctor, everything would be right in the world again. 

I was wrong.  

Monday’s ultrasound revealed that the light had gone out.  Our baby was gone. 

Life continued.  Amazingly. Cruelly.  Striking was the juxtaposition of loss and life.  Of peace and terror.  It was alarming how the opposites coexisted.  Coffee in the calm of a rainy morning against the ring of a gunshot in the afternoon.  Warmth near a crackling fire before weeping in a cold downpour.  

All my life, I actually thought life could be, and should be, black and white.  Happiness existed apart from sadness.  Good existed outside of evil.  As the earth continued to spin beneath my feet and mundane activities carried on alongside my pain, I had to acknowledge that none of us are immune to suffering. And that was scary as hell. 

I liked my life in a pretty little box, not unlike the one that usually houses this photograph. And it shook me to my core to know that I could have my little box all laid out, pristine and perfect, but that it wasn't up to me as to whether my life would fit inside of it. Sometimes, the paradox and complexity of living would simply blow the box up all together. But since that shocking revelation, and having spent some time in a world completely off its axis, I've come to see that Life is made rich when the box is blown up and that the magnitude of life cannot be contained. I'm not saying that my life is now a postcard. I'm saying the opposite. My life, now, is messier than I ever dreamed it would be. I am messier. I find myself most days asking the question, "What the hell am I doing?" But at the same time, a steady road is unfolding and leading me toward understanding that the answer to that question is unimportant. And the final destination of that path, however meandering and unending, is the knowledge that the beauty is in the asking. I haven't yet arrived, though, at my final destination. As of this moment, my heart still beats.
Depending on your perspective, this realization can be disheartening, terrifying, or liberating. Disheartening if you feel resigned to the fact that this is life - happy sometimes, unhappy at other times. Terrifying if you dwell on how perfectly unable we are to exercise any control over this big, bad world. Or liberating. Liberating because with every single experience comes the opportunity to find something beautiful, to find opportunity to grow, to find compassion for another who is also making their way through Life.

I think of my Son, Silas, as I write this. I think of who I want him to grow into. I want him to be strong, brave, resilient, and kind to others. But I also want him to be vulnerable, sensitive, wise, and kind to himself. It doesn't serve us to be taught that if we are good, make good grades, be nice to others, and plan well, life will turn out well for us. Of course all of those things help. But we need to know, at every stage of our lives, that life can get messy despite our best efforts. And that it's okay if life gets messy because some really beautiful things can grow from the rubble of an imperfect life. That rubble is rich. Much richer than the paved over perfection we find ourselves striving for. The question is, can we learn to live in the rubble? Can we free ourselves from the expectations we have enough to recognize the gifts we are given in the midst of suffering?

Eckhart Tolle says, "Suffering is necessary until you realize it is unnecessary." At the magical moment when we realize that our suffering was only necessary to lead us to our own ability to move ourselves out of it, that is the moment we realize how beautiful this life is. A life where all things are orchestrated so perfectly as to use imperfection, and sometimes devastation, to hold a mirror up for us so that we can see how strong, brave, resilient, vulnerable, sensitive, wise, and kind we are at our very core. It is efforting through pain that leads us to realize the effortlessness with which we are meant to live. There is no truth more paradoxical than that. And there is no truer truth.