Khalil Gibran said “Your joy is your sorrow unmasked. And the self-same well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears…. The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain… Verily you are suspended like scales between your sorrow and your joy. Only when you are empty are you at standstill and balanced.”
I have been aware for years that we live our lives in cycles. It is easy to see those cycles in the lives of others and to encourage them to have faith. It is something else to live through a cycle myself and dig for that faith at times.
On the eve of a new year, it is natural to look back and contemplate what is past.
I am looking back at a cycle of loss of many people that I love and that were important to me.
I worked for years on having a good relationship with my stepsiblings. Those relationships went up in flames because of actions that were malicious and completely unexpected.
100 I told myself that I am fortunate because I still have my siblings left. When I moved back to South Africa, I discovered that I had lost my siblings years before, and I was the one clinging to an illusion of family and love. The relationship with all of them had been one-sided for decades, and I told myself that it was because of the physical distance between us (I was living in the UK at the time). It was only after I had eliminated the physical distance that I discovered those relationships were illusions that I had clung to for decades.
Before I could even say but that is OK, I still have my child left, he attempted to make an end to his life and laid the blame 100% at my door. I realised that his actions were the culmination of decades of resentment that I was blissfully unaware of because I was too busy loving him.
“Only when you are empty are you at a standstill and balanced.”
I am putting a cycle of deep sorrow behind me, and I am empty. This is not a poor me moment. This is a moment of acknowledging that I am ready for the joy that is inevitable to follow, because the Universe is balanced and a void is always filled, no matter what.
“… the self-same well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears…”
As the cliché goes: “It will always work out in the end … and if it is not working out yet, it is not the end yet …”
Namaste.
