Every day I face an impossible dilemma.
Do I read the news and open myself to the images of horror and injustice and suffering and atrocity that come from every corner of the globe?
Or do I turn myself away, not to ignore what’s happening but to preserve the capacity of my heart to meet the world right in front of me with kindness and with joy?
Ideally there would be a single, easy answer—my mind so likes a single, easy answer—but neither of these answers feel right to me. I do not want to shut my eyes to the wider world but I also don’t want to burn out my heart. What then can I or anyone do?
To which sometimes the only answer is to ask and to wait, fully aware of the whole question and the whole predicament. Then sometimes an answer may find us.
That’s what happened to me recently while reflecting on a verse from the Kural, the classical Tamil masterpiece on the art of living. In its chapter on serving family, there’s a poem that has reassured me and disturbed me at the same time:
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Like the strong-hearted in battle—those able in family
Bear the weight
It has reassured me because sometimes I have borne such a weight, either in my own family or in the wider human and more than human family as I know it in my part of the world. Reading the poem reminds me that I bear it because I can and because I have a strong heart.
But then another voice in me wonders if this also brings the danger of becoming a false martyr. I think we all know the experience of taking on too much and then paying—or making others pay—the price for it.
Then there’s my discomfort with the metaphor. As worthy as it might be to be “strong-hearted in battle,” I have long tried to resist the story of endless war. In our time it seems everything must end up as a war, not just against other people but also against the latest entirely abstract enemy—terrorism, crime, drugs, whatever.
Even in our schools and universities we enshrine the art of “attacking” the ideas of others and “defending” our own. I’m sick of it. I think we’re all sick of it.
And yet, if I keep sitting with the poem, I also notice that what matters to the poet Tiruvalluvar isn’t actually the battle but the strength of one’s heart. He reminds us to have courage in hard times, however they may appear. This, this I can honor.
To be able to bear a weight, then, is to have a strong heart. To cultivate our heart, to strengthen it, to nourish it. And here is where something in my own story has changed.
A few weeks ago I had a chance to participate in a family constellations workshop that sought to help people to open their hearts and also to be able to reconcile with their families, especially their wider families, including relatives who have died, maybe very long ago. I watched people remember and see anew the stories of their ancestors in ways that allowed for healing and the renewal of love, sometimes across as many as seven generations. I experienced for myself how the breath of the ancestors can blow through us as surely as the wind through the trees. And I was surprised by how deeply this form of inner work, developed by Bert Hellinger in 20th century Germany, could also speak to my own experience of honoring the dead, particularly in my mother’s family, coming from Okinawa, where such honoring is a part of daily and more than daily life.
And in remembering the possibility of this honor I realized I’d been telling myself an incomplete story about this verse from the Kural on family. I’d assumed, without assuming I was assuming it, that those “able in family” were only among the living. Not so. If I remember instead that those able in family may also be among the dead, and that the dead may at times be more able than I am, I’m no longer trapped in that story of false martyrdom because I no longer have to do it all alone.
Instead I can remember to allow the dead to help too, by remembering their stories and their lives and their examples.
And by letting them stand with me and behind me as I read the daily news, reminding me that our hearts are far larger than they seem, and that reading and turning may be part of the same dance, each strengthening the heart in its own way.
Thomas Hitoshi Pruiksma is a writer, poet, and translator. https://thomaspruiksma.com/
His upcoming course TALLER THAN A MOUNTAIN looks magnificent to us, begins on April 27th, and you can find details at https://thomaspruiksma.com/taller-than-a-mountain/