We Dance While We Ache
Pain and pleasure are not mutually exclusive and I don't know how we are going to sustain ourselves individually and collectively if we don't dance
We Dance While We Ache
Recently I realized that I have a combative relationship with disappointment. I hate feeling disappointment and I have a hard time handling it in other people. To be dissappointed brings up feelings of being trapped in the feeling turned resentment turned rage, piled high, and screaming out, wanting to hurt, determined to hate.
When it comes to disappointment, there is a lot of pain there. Because there is a lot of pain, during challenging times, it is easy for all of my practices of mindfulness and compassion to be overshadowed by my default way of moving through the world which is to force hard feelings into submission by way of critique and control.
This default of micromanaging my life to evade pain gives me a false, yet familiar, sense of agency. If I could just figure out and out and out, I think, pulling on an invisible thread, I could find some reprieve from the ache.
As this is my default, I have been doing some kind of compulsive fixing my whole life and I’ve never really hurt any less.
I pull the thread, and pull the thread, and pull thread, but there is no real end to the ache.
Which is why, the other day as an insignificant disappointment morphed its way into a spiral of thoughts and fears and failings, I decided to dance.
Because as much as pain is inevitable, there is more than just the ache.
As I danced I let myself feel the pain, but I also allowed myself to feel pleasure. Those two feelings are not mutually exclusive. They can’t be.
Because in some ways we are always aching. It is the product of being alive and especially the product of living in connection with other people. But if we are only aching, what does that do for any of us?
This newsletter has been pretty hard to write because it feels like there is too much collective pain to have anything to say about the individual. My writing doesn't feel substantial enough to hold the weight of this world. Which is true, because writing isn’t the action we need right now and also because I am only one person.
People are dying in Gaza with my tax dollars. And people are dying in the US with my tax dollars and people are dying and people are dying and people are dying. While I believe change is inevitable and possible, and the situation in Gaza is urgent, there is no world where all of this pain disappears. As such, I cannot hold this weight alone.
We ache alongside each other.
But because we ache alongside each other, we also hope alongside each other, and dream alongside each other and find moments of joy alongside each other. Experiencing more than pain is not the same as refusing to hold the ache, instead it is how we resist hardening our hearts as the work is long and there is no real end to it.
In many ways it feels selfish to be writing about the self through the lens of my problems, when we need more of the collective, but our collective ache and also our collective joy is the sum of all of its parts.
When I choose to dance with my pain, I enter into a new relationship with it, one in which feeling disappointed doesn’t have to be met with so much resistance. When I choose to dance with my pain, it loses its power to pull me into a hopelessness I cannot so easily pull myself out of. When I choose to dance with my pain, I can hold two truths at the same time, finding the pleasure necessary to keep going.
I am part of the sum. When I choose to dance with my pain, I practice dancing with our pain too.
As Adrienne Marie Brown writes “A Prayer for Palestine–Hope in the Face of Hopelessness”
“We deserve a shared earth Bring attention to life Even in the form of grief Holy ones when it feels unbearable Remind us, somewhere there waits a seed that only opens in the fire And the future lives within it And each of us is that seed And each of us is that fire”
Each of us the fire: There is no real end to the pain.
Each of us is the seed: There is more than the ache.
I dance to remember both are needed and both are true.
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With love,
Kim
Kim, thank you for this. It resonated so deeply for me. We ache and we dance together <3
Kim - I identified with your beautiful words on so many levels. And you know how much I love to dance! Thank you!