The purpose of this life, I think, at the core of all forms is to accept our inseparability from everything else and carry love in our hearts throughout the perilous swings of this human experience. I would argue the point is certainly not to simply bear and tolerate the tribulations that we will face, for that is the easier path, but to come to a place of loving surrender through which everything is made new in our perspective of reality. When we arrive in this surrender, all vanity and insecurity fall away from the essential truth that encompasses all that is good in this experience.
This is not at all to say that an attitude of ignorance or a feigned, naive bliss will be the resolution to the darkest places of our mind and the greatest fears we hold; the attitude must be one of awareness, through which acceptance and surrender become possible.
We may also fall into the trap of dismissing these sorrows of life when they cease to arise for extended periods of time, or worse, when they do appear but we cannot summon the inner fortitude to confront these facts of reality and submerge into the truth they hold for us.
This grief I’m speaking of isn’t exclusive to any one event, but it most commonly occurs around death—one of the only certainties we will ever have. In the same way that each morning comes about to offer us a new chance to stop, sit and connect with the world around us in a way we have never before, so too does death offer the invitation to sit with the pain we have held, to feel the love we have shared and to sink into what we are. Death not only bridges the divide from this life across the abyss, but provides the break, even if momentarily, in our lives to stop and surrender to the baggage we have been carrying on our shoulders, often in ignorance of its residual weight.
Quite simply, pain and sorrow cannot pass without an intentional acknowledgement of our innermost feelings. We can run from the feelings, sure, but doing so will only leave us more fragile than before—more vulnerable to breaking in the event that we ever choose to let down our emotional guard.
Although hard to see, especially in the midst of grieving, these events are what comprise the meaning and purpose of our life: to know that we have given all of ourselves to a state of impermanence and that in acknowledgement of our transience, we have consciously chosen to take up the cause and carry love through this pathway of heartbreak. The irony is that these greatest sorrows provide us with our greatest joy and hope—knowing that we have loved and lost, and in doing so have gone deep into the marrow of life and taken the lessons which have always remained accessible, if only for us to set aside our ego and sink into what we are: love.
“’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”
~ Alfred Lord Tennyson