It's A Gift To Exist
Talking About Grief
I’m going to take a stab here at writing about something that is complex and personal. It’s not going to be for everyone. Mostly it’s for me. All my life I have heard variations on “love your life, love each day of your life” and I haven’t really been able to do that. Not consistently. I haven’t even understood what they were talking about. A couple of years ago, I caught a clip from and an interview that Anderson Cooper did with Stephen Colbert. The first time I heard this interview, I thought , “Ah, there it is again. Love your life as it is, good days and bad days”. However, I was still shaking my confused head. Maybe I’m finally getting access to ideas that were previously unaccessible but I heard it again about a week ago and it resonated. It’s been playing in my head ever since. I have a better idea of what the wise ones are saying when they talk about love every day of your life.
I highly recommend that you take the handful of minutes necessary to listen to the core of the interview. It’s a beautiful, poetic passage. I will include a link at the bottom.
Here is the gist of it:
Stephen Colbert: “The bravest thing you can do is accept with gratitude the world as it is.”
Anderson Cooper: You told an interviewer that you have learned to, in your words, “love the thing that I most wish had not happened”. You went on to say, “What punishments of God are not gifts?” Do you really believe that?
Stephen Colbert: Yes. It's a gift to exist. And with existence comes suffering. There's no escaping that…..I didn’t learn that I was grateful for the thing that I most wish had not happened, so much as I realized it. But if you are grateful for your life ….then you have to be grateful for all of it. You can’t pick and choose what you’re grateful for. But, what do you get from loss? You get awareness of other people’s loss which allows you to connect with that other person, which then allows you to love more deeply and to understand what it is like to be a human being… And so at a young age, I suffered something and by the time I was in serious relationships in my life, with friends or with my wife or with my children, I had some understanding that everybody is suffering. However imperfectly, I can acknowledge their suffering and connect with them and love them in a deep way. That makes you grateful for the fact that you have suffered so that you can know that about other people….It’s about the fullness of your humanity. What’s the point of being here and being human, if you can’t make the most of your humanity? I want to be the most human I can be, and that involves acknowledging and ultimately being grateful for the things that I wish hadn’t happened because they gave me a gift.”
Just watch the interview. You may not be a fan of Stephen Colbert but he is a reflective man who was handed tragedy at a very young age. He is a practicing Catholic yet smart enough not to be a sheep. He’s clearly thought through some of the Big Questions and he is articulate enough to convey his beliefs.
What changed for me after I recently heard this clip, was that I started thinking of the good days and the bad days of life. I will only get so many hours, so many days, weeks, before this life ends. I want to notice the enjoyable days and the hard days. I want to take the hard days and turn them into reminders that everyone suffers. Maybe my hard day can be used in some way to connect to others, to connect to humanity. Maybe I can accept, with gratitude, the world as it is. The days, good or bad, ARE a gift. People who have suffered unfathomable losses know that. My losses and hard days have been of the most common kind. But I am getting older and maybe I can see now what I couldn’t see with younger eyes. My eyes have not been impacted by grievous loss. But they are open and they want to see the Beauty in the world, in every day.
IDK . Life.
The shorter clip of this interview: Stephen Colbert on grief
The full interview: The full interview
Dear GracieWilde:
I am sitting in a clinic getting an IV. All of the details won’t matter as it is personally mine alone. However, I am surrounded by at least 10 other humans getting IV. All have experienced the hard part . All are looking for and silently hoping they are going to get back to the good part.
It has been a real gift in that humans experiencing the good and the bad are open to sharing their stories. All are different, and all are the same. We rode the Farris wheel screaming with glee. Then it went furiously downhill and scared the bejesus out of us.
Then it started the slow arduous climb uphill and all the good and hope came along for the ride. We stayed onboard. After all, unlike all other animals we have the ability to think it through into the outer limits . Good or bad …. Hope loops its’ lasso around us. So, the glory is in the magnifying glass we all carry in our hearts. Make it big enough to see and then we can choose which picture will work today.
I watched a magnificent film about a “blowfish” and its’ journey to adulthood through the coral reef. That is the miracle we have access to. Nature and the brilliance of each step: survival or death. Both gems in the journey. May we keep watching and absorbing with every breath the miracle of being on this planet. But….. it asks only that you pay attention and learn. That becomes Empathy. Without it we are a dead coral reef.
For me, there's no need to watch the interview. I just like this the way you told it. It reminded me of an old movie I saw, called Shadowlands, in which Anthony Hopkins, playing C. S. Lewis, says: 'The pain now is part of the joy back then - that's the deal.' It's a good movie (a great love story) but very sad.