One morning this summer, while sitting in meditation, a phrase appeared to me that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since:

Life is impermanent,

Impossibly beautiful.

These two things, impermanence and beauty, change and wonder, have felt inseparable in my life lately. It’s an odd feeling, and different from how we usually relate to what’s meaningful in our lives. We are drawn to what feels lasting, enduring, and familiar. We want to take what we love along with us as we move through life, to have things that can endure the turmoil of inevitable change.

Our instinct is to cling to what we care about, to hold onto it as long as we can. We want our relationships to stay in the forms that please us. When we buy something, we need to keep it as ‘new’ as possible. If we’re favored at work, we don’t want anyone else getting in the way. Life as a possession, as something we ‘own’, can be reassuring, comforting in a certain sense.

In recent weeks, my whole life has been the opposite of this. I’ve felt increasingly unable to hold onto anything that I love. The people whom I’m closest to have moved, or live far away on other sides of the country. I’ve changed neighborhoods, switched teams in my job, experienced uncertainty in my role altogether. My parents are getting older. In the day-to-day life as a hospice chaplain, I’ve seen people whom I’ve grown fond of pass away unexpectedly, families experience sudden unrest, life happening in ways they had not hoped for.

These might sound like negative or stressful experiences. Maybe they’ve been challenging in a relative sense, but sitting with them has revealed something more. Each change has felt less like a loss than an invitation to draw closer to life, to listen closely to its rhythm. In doing so, I’ve discovered happiness in the joy that my friends are finding in their lives. The times I get to reconnect with my loved ones feel priceless. I’m learning with my parents in new ways. Conversations in my work are savored for their wisdom and fresh honesty. Alongside disappointment and uncertainty, I’m finding gratitude, patience, and opportunities to rest in appreciation.

When I can’t separate the beauty of life from the fact that it changes, a door seems to open. Through that door lies a chance to be deeply, vibrantly present: instead of resisting the passing of things, I find myself still, stunned by what graces my life. Knowing that something will go away has made its arrival a profound blessing.

Maybe it’s living in New York City, or the hours spent living along the edges of life and death, but I’ve felt compelled by the urge to make enough space for everything that happens. It hasn’t felt right to box things out, to avoid what’s discomforting, or make parts of my life untouchable. I don’t want to turn away from the hard stuff, and I want to embrace what’s good with everything I have. All of it seems to matter somehow, life calling to itself from different places.

In this practice of holding both things, it’s also relaxing my instinct to deal in opposites. Collective life is overwhelmed by this: things are either good or bad, hopeful or hopeless, emergent or catastrophic. Emotionally, psychologically, dare I say spiritually; it’s very intense to live this way. It’s like having a person tugging on each of our arms, pulling as hard as they possibly can.

The anxiety, I think, is to know where we stand. Not only are we experiencing change in the world (and in our lives), but we are experiencing it at a pace that is simply too rapid to process meaningfully. Our consciousness is aware of how things move not only in our homes, but in our state, our country, our planet, all at once. How is one person supposed to make sense of that? How is anyone meant to experience this change carefully, thoughtfully, or consider what it means for their own life? To at least have a name for that change (it’s an apocalypse!), to give it a label (everything will be fine), offers a place to land, a sense of direction.

For myself, moving outside of that dichotomy has given some perspective. In fact, I haven’t written here for a while because I’ve felt buried in points of view, flooded with opinions (good and bad) about how I ‘should’ feel about the change we all experience in the world. The scale of perspective matches the rate of change: there is a real urgency to describe, interpret, and determine what is happening as quickly as it occurs. Rather than relate to change, we’re driven to explain it. While not entirely a bad thing, I’ve felt overwhelmed by explanation and untethered from my own sense of things. Recognizing that, I needed a chance to step back and wonder about what’s moving for me.

The Catholic contemplative Thomas Merton (whom I’ve quoted here before) once wrote,

We have been brought up with the absurd prejudice that only what we can reduce to a rational and conscious formula is really understood and experienced in our life. When we can say what a thing is, or what we are doing, we think we fully grasp and experience it…this verbalization…tends to cut us off from genuine experience and to obscure our understanding instead of increasing it.1

Strong words, but I think there’s something there that speaks to how we are grappling with change today. Perhaps the overload of opinion, the emphatic need to determine its direction, reflects the underlying impulse to “fully grasp and experience it”. Or: it reflects the fear that we have no grasp on things to begin with; that we feel out of control and disoriented about our lives altogether.

Personally, I would not go so far as to label this reaction as absurd; I think it’s safe to simply name how it can get us in trouble. It is entirely natural, and very human, to feel threatened by change. After all, impermanence likely reflects what we fear most: dying. Each change in our life is a miniature death, a transition from familiar to unknown. From the smallest disruptions to the biggest losses of our lives, we experience change as an unwelcome interruption to the expected, the planned, the hopeful.

Where is the beauty in that? How can our lives be uncertain and whole at the same time?

I have no intent to use this platform to add to the answer-mill, and I’m not sure that these questions offer satisfying answers in word anyway. I think we have to see for ourselves, to give our lives a chance to say more than one thing. I agree with Merton that we can lean too heavily on rationalizing, that explanations can at times lead us further away from what’s genuine. Far from having answers myself, I only know that I’m engaging something in my life that’s causing me to ask such questions. At the very least, exploring them seems to lead somewhere.2

One thing that remains possible for us right now is the opportunity to hold more than one thing, even if they seem to contradict each other. That is very hard to do in a world that demands that we define ourselves, stand in something specific, pick a side, so to speak. To suggest doing this implies that we’re playing devil’s advocate, or acting contrarian to avoid taking responsibility. We are suspicious, and rightly so, of phrases like “two things can be true at the same time”, which seems to reduce values and authentic experiences into vague agreements.

I think learning to hold our lives with two hands is an act of taking more responsibility, not less. Inevitably, you face the contradictions of being human, both within yourself and in the conflicts that we’ve created in the world. You are not allowed the safety of explaining things away-you have to keep looking, compelled to go deeper. It’s uncomfortable, but also expansive. It increases our capacity to live in the world, to be more conscious, curious humans.

Looking into my own hands, I can see this perspective which feels true for me. Life is impermanent. It is impossibly beautiful. I can see them both in my palms, feel how they shift and link together. Somehow, in some way, they seem to be inextricably linked.

In recent months, my heart has broken daily while experiencing joy unlike anything I’ve encountered in my life. I am in love, while losing what I find lovely. I find peace and resolve as the world burns. People give me hope while others ruin lives. All of these things happen together, are equally important, and I cannot separate them from each other. I don’t understand how, but I know that I have two hands to hold it all as best I can.

Life is never going to be just one thing, and to reduce it as such is to reduce ourselves, to make ourselves smaller. Holding life with two hands is an act of interest, of belief in our own being. In doing so, we say yes to mystery and allow it to teach us something. As life inevitably changes, we allow ourselves to transform with it. It is true that we must inevitably let go of things that we love, but that does not make life less beautiful. Perhaps as we allow things to change, that beauty becomes a part of us, allowing us to express it back into the world.

“The bad news is you’re falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is, there's no ground.”

This quote is from the founder of the university where I attended my graduate studies. It’s one that’s quoted often, and a memorable one that’s stuck with me since I first encountered it. We’ll come back to it later!

A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of officiating a memorial service for a neighbor1 of mine (we’ll call him ‘Mark’) who I’d been working with. These kinds of opportunities are rare in the hospice field. We don’t explicitly offer to support families in this way (as much as I’d like to personally), and our service typically ends on the day of a person’s death.

Admittedly, I was surprised at first to receive his family’s invitation. I had only met them once before Mark’s passing. He had been battling glioblastoma, a rare and aggressive form of brain cancer, for about a year. My visit was at the very end of his life, and it was an incredibly challenging time for his family. Mark and I didn’t have the chance to speak personally, as his illness had rapidly progressed and left him sleeping most days. As I met with Mark’s wife and one of his children in his home, it was clear to me how painful this experience had been, and how difficult this loss would be.

To be completely honest, I wasn’t sure what they thought of me or how the visit went. There was a lot of pain in the room, and there were many questions that I could not answer. Sometimes, the temptation to say something that will paper over anguish is overwhelming. There is the small but persistent desire to push the uncomfortable away, to avoid sitting with what’s real and alive in the moment.

Especially when people are in the middle of their grief and turmoil, the urge to “fix” it and take it away from them can be powerful. Of course, that’s not my job; my work is to attune, to listen, and accompany suffering alongside people. Pretending to do or say something that offers false comfort would be a disservice both to a family and to myself. With Mark’s family, I could see the desire for answers, the yearning for things to be otherwise. I had to hold my nerve and avoid the temptation to change something I couldn’t, instead maintaining my care and attentiveness to the feelings alive in the room. I left their home ruminating a bit, but curious about what might unfold.

We had made plans for another visit that following week. Sadly, Mark passed away the day before I was scheduled to come back, the day before his birthday. I made my condolence calls as I always do, thinking that was the end of my encounter with his family. When they reached out about a month after his death, asking if I would be willing to help them plan his funeral, I was caught off guard. I wasn’t sure if anything I had said or done had served them, but I was honored to help. We spent the next few weeks on the phone and over email, crafting stories, ceremony, and reflections that would honor Mark’s life and the legacy of his time on Earth.

The day of his memorial came, and the chapel in which it was held quickly ran out of seating. As people gathered and the benches filled, I had a few quiet moments to sit by myself and observe. Family embraced, friends shook hands, and a community of people came together to mourn and comfort each other. Watching the scene unfold, I was suddenly struck by the enormity of the moment, as if I had snapped out of sleep. It occurred to me how many stories surrounded me: stories of friendship, family, success, struggle, joy, and loss. Decades of time and relationship with Mark were streaming into this room, like rivers flowing into the sea. I sat there like a single drop, in an ocean of human feeling and memory. What’s more, I was a stranger to all aside from Mark’s immediate family. In a few minutes, I would be standing up in front of them, speaking for someone who, in truth, was known least of all by me.

I found myself thinking: “What am I doing here? What’s happening right now?”. I wasn’t asking this out of doubt, or in fear of getting up to speak. It was a question of perspective, of sitting with where I was and what life had called me to do on this particular day. I spend a lot of time around the emotions I was witnessing-and yet, in this moment, something about them felt different. I was moved by seeing so many people come together to join in tender tribute, holding a sacred space for one another.

I think we live fairly isolated lives, not really aware or in touch with what’s happening in the shared worlds of one another. Generally speaking, we don’t get many chances to witness the care and concern that was on display in the chapel. On my harder days, sometimes I feel like we’re in a crisis of empathy, unable or unwilling to feel anything towards one another. Sitting there with Mark’s community, preparing for a time of connection among people I didn’t know (and who didn’t know me), was a surreal and powerful feeling.

Mark’s memorial was a celebration of life in every sense. I’ll remember every moment of it: the words shared by his children, the tears of those who loved him, the delight of hearing stories about the life he lived, the feeling of singing his favorite songs with hundreds of other people. It felt like a reminder of how important it is to honor what we lose, and what it means to do so alongside others. In turn, grieving didn’t just mean feeling sad. Laughter, gratitude, and generosity also had a seat at the table.

I spent some time at the reception afterwards making my rounds and sharing with Mark’s friends and family. Eventually, the moment came to say goodbye: I had another family to see that day, and it was time for life to go on. I said my farewells, and made my way out of the building. As I turned the corner and walked away down the street, I had the feeling of finality. My life had found this unexpected and incredible crossroads with Mark and his family, and now it had come to end. Bound by this shared experience, we went our separate ways, down our own paths.

I share this story because it reminded me of what can happen when things fall apart. For Mark’s community, a precious and beloved part of their world had come to an end. On that day, they said goodbye to a father, a brother, a husband, a friend. Life would not be quite the same again, and the sorrow of that parting was profound.

In those moments, when life is falling apart and we lose what we care about, it can seem like a future is impossible. Everything seems dark, and the warmth of life far away. In the uncertainty, we aren’t sure of how we will carry on, or if anything will arrive beyond more pain.

I wonder if we are all feeling that kind of loss right now, in one way or another. I think it is true to say that our shared life is in a sort of dying process: across our ecosystems, our societies, our political and economic realities. All of that is passing away, right in front of us. Every missile fired, every innocent death at the hands of the greedy and powerful, every back turned on those in need, is a witness and proof of that.

We’re also trying to fix things in ways we know we can’t, clinging to the past in fear that the future won’t exist without it. Our answers, at least right now, have no belief in things being different. Our response is to spend billions on new wars, to give even more to the wealthy, to solidify mistrust and ignore what’s right in front of us. These are things that we have always done when we know things are collapsing, changing, meeting the uncertain. The ground beneath us is not as solid as we believed it to be.

So here we are: falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. It is unlikely that anyone is coming to catch us, that the way things are going will magically reverse themselves. What do we do?

What does it mean to say that there’s no ground?

What I have been realizing for myself lately is this: despite the terror and absurdity and unrelenting cruelty of this moment, I am not afraid of it. It pains me deeply, but it does not steal my hope or my purpose. As things fall apart, I find myself falling not into despair but deeper in love: with life, with people, with the world and everything in it. The more I see loss, the more I see how much the world matters. The deeper the loss, the more important it becomes to live out whatever light exists in my life. I don’t want to shut down, or turn away; I want to open up, bending towards everything and everyone.

If I am falling, but I’m not in danger of striking the ground, then I have a chance to steady myself in space, get my bearings, and look around. What can I see if I’m willing to face reality, to look at things beyond the view of my preferences, my fears, my insecurities?

These days, I see a horizon of belonging. I see the possibility of healing, growth, and transformation in every person I encounter. Every bedside I sit with has started to feel like a family member’s. Every shared laugh feels like a blessing, every sorrow an invitation to open up and soften. It’s not an experience of taking on the world as if I have to carry it myself: it’s the practice of relationship, of living in the constant reminder that I am not separate. I’m learning how to fall deeper into life, not outside of it.

The more I practice, the more I want to be a part of it. I’m learning (or even re-learning) the courage and insight that comes from embracing the experience of falling itself. Relaxing into it, I watch my fear begin to ebb away. I can show up to life and care with honesty, instead of desperately avoiding what already is.

Cutting ourselves off from the hardship and difficulty of reality will not save us. It only increases our isolation, blocks our resolve, prevents us from recognizing that this is something that we are all going through. To pretend otherwise may offer temporary relief, but only delays the inevitable. As it was often quoted in my days as a psychology student: “what we resist, persists”. Imagining that we can exist outside of life instead of within it, we live in perpetual fear of falling, of ground giving way and plummeting to our deaths.

Rather than tumble wildly through the air, out of control without knowing where I am or what’s happening, I want to practice falling gracefully, courageously, without apology or fear of the unknown. I want to fall upwards into hope, and deeper into what truly matters to me. I want to embrace the space of my own movement, using the energy of my life to share, bear witness, and embrace the change that affects us all.

Despite my learning, I still wish things weren’t this way. More than anything else, I want a life for our planet that is not in constant chaos, driven by the obscene hunger for war, profit, and making people suffer. I grieve the unfathomable loss taking place: not only the lives lost in this moment, but also the loss of what could have been, and what we will continue to lose on this path of death and destruction.

Nevertheless, I accept that this is where we are. Things are falling apart, and perhaps they always have been. Maybe the difference is in visibility: we can no longer hide how clear our collapse is, how necessary it is to seek change, the importance of taking responsibility for our future. It’s not the end of the world: a future does exist, but its shape depends on our ability to embrace our present.

When things fall apart, it does not signal our inevitable end. There is loss, there is grief, there is the pain of letting go, but there is also more than that. As I found in my encounter with Mark’s family, that something is just as real as the unraveling, unexpected and deeply healing. Even as we fall, we can still find each other. What emerges from those connections is both priceless and beloved.

We are all falling together. We can plunge screaming, alone, disoriented and bracing for an impact that will never come. Or, we can find each other in space and embrace one another, reaching towards the honesty of who we are and the vast potential of who we can be.

I’ve had a meditation practice that I’ve now kept for over ten years. At the end of each session, I conclude my practice with this offering:

Living beings are numberless, I vow to serve them. 
Delusions are inexhaustible, I vow to end them. 
Dharma gates are numberless, I vow to enter them. 
The way of the Buddha is unattainable, I vow to become it. 

Because these verses use Buddhist language, allow me to rephrase them in more general terms:

The opportunities to be of benefit to others are without limit. I commit to these opportunities.

It is easy to be caught in confusion and ignorance, causing harm to myself and others. I commit to avoiding harm, and creating conditions that harm others. 

Reality offers limitless chances to grow in compassion and wisdom. I commit to recognizing life in this way. 

Living fully in reality is difficult. I commit to doing so. 

What you might notice right away is the ‘infinite’ language used in the original verse. Numberless, inexhaustible, unattainable. As far as making commitments go, these may seem like contradictory statements. How are these things achievable, if it’s impossible to reach a certain goal?

For me, these vows are more than just reminding myself of my personal obligations as a practitioner of Buddhism. It’s recalling the daily paradox of being human: that we are capable of everything, even in a finite space. It doesn’t matter what the situation is: there’s still something to be discovered. There is much that can be accomplished, even amidst countless obstacles.

It’s not a matter of setting the bar impossibly high, or setting personal expectations that can never be met. It’s about cultivating an attitude that gives life more space: acknowledging that nothing that happens is the final word, that possibility is a natural function of life and always will be.

How we act within this paradox is what ultimately matters. It’s not enough to know something is possible; we have to give that possibility shape. For me, discovering how my pursuit of these commitments out in the world is where I can make my life count. It’s not about acquiring certainty about how life works, but challenging myself to be curious and see if I’m willing to let my commitments change me.

As a human being, it is highly unlikely (in my opinion), that I will be of benefit to everyone. I don’t think I’ll be able to release all confusion within myself, or become a Buddha. It is more likely that I will try to do my best, while making plenty of mistakes along the way and feeling all kinds of resistance.

If I cannot accomplish these goals in their entirety, then noticing what happens when I point myself in their direction becomes an interesting situation. What I appreciate about these verses is their energetic quality: This is hard. Keep going. The odds are long. Try anyway. It’s an impossible task. Find out if that’s true. Orienting myself towards something beyond skepticism or doubt takes me outside of a comfort zone. It gives me the chance to see more of my nature, how genuine I can be in the world.

Of course, none of this easy. What has been particularly challenging for me can be found in the third verse: Reality offers limitless chances to grow in compassion and wisdom. I commit to recognizing life in this way. I’ve struggled with this, especially lately. Accepting this invitation to practice and grow into a more loving human frequently feels like a tall task.

As I explore this commitment, the city I grew up in remains under ICE occupation. People are dying, families are being torn apart, detained and disappeared without any respect toward their rights or humanity. All over the world, we are reckoning with cruelty and inhumanity of the highest order. At times, it feels like the worst of what humans can do is being encouraged instead of challenged. Indifferent brutality of all kinds is not only persistent, but protected.

It might sound crazy, but my vows tell me that these are the ideal conditions to lean into. The pressure of the moment is the opportunity to wake up: stepping into the humanity that I own and the humanity I share with everyone around me. Instead of falling into despair and hopelessness, I’m called to walk through fear and towards a bigger version of who I can be.

In practice, I’ve learned that everything in life is something to connect with. There’s nothing to run away from, no experience to be rejected (even if I don’t agree with it). Whatever happens is something to lean into, an opportunity to become more of a human being.

It takes effort to make that kind of choice, to say nothing of turning it into a lifelong practice. How can I have compassion for the masked agent who kidnaps a child, the politician who gleefully celebrates bombing a city, the openly racist president who mocks peoples’ pain and suffering? Where can wisdom be found in a world that feels like it’s lost its sanity?

The point of my vows are to find out. I don’t have the answers to these questions, not even in this moment of writing. There are days where I don’t want to do any of these things. I don’t want to recognize wisdom or compassion. I’m in the process of discovering where my resistance is, asking myself to stay attentive to where I open and when I close. It’s challenging, but it feels more potent than zoning out and shutting down. Ignorance is not bliss; it’s more suffering, particularly for those who are more vulnerable than I am. Staying close, refusing to lose my empathy, connecting to my sense of being human: this is the work. I don’t fully know what I’ll discover in pursuit of these commitments, but I sense that practicing what they symbolize is important.

As I write, I’m reminded of something that a professor of mine once shared with me. I can’t remember if I’ve written about it here, but it’s worth mentioning once more.

It was an Introduction to Justice and Peace Studies class. I was tacking on a minor in this field at the end of my college studies, during my senior year. The professor in question was a practitioner as much as a scholar: he had spent his entire life in circles of activism, organizing, and political practice. I was eager to take his course and learn more about what it’s like to practice justice work in real time.

Standing up in front of the class, preparing to teach a section on successful resistance movements, he uttered something that made everyone pause. “The first step in justice work is acknowledging that you will live and die in an unjust world.”

You probably could have heard a pin drop after he said that. I recall a few incredulous glances being exchanged between my peers. That’s what we’re starting with? What is that supposed to mean? For a group of 18-21 year olds, it’s not necessarily the most encouraging thing to hear.

The point my professor was making is the same paradox present in my vows. That is, it’s important to acknowledge the challenge of the task. It is unlikely that we’ll ever see the fruit of how we act in our present lives. Human beings have made this world a profoundly difficult place to live in for one another, and the work of making it more bearable is longer than one lifetime.

But that’s only one side of the story. Recognizing that something is hard doesn’t make it impossible, or not worth doing. Even in this lifetime (as my professor went on to demonstrate), we can witness profound change. Empires fall, hearts soften, humanity finds a different way to live. Everything we believe to be so immovable today, may come apart tomorrow.

If what we hope for doesn’t happen in the present, we may give life to something in the future. For example, if these resistance movements in different parts of the world hadn’t happened, if ordinary people hadn’t found their courage and come together to struggle for something better, then there would’ve been nothing for my professor to teach. No class, no inspiration, no wisdom or knowledge of how things can be different. Because of their belief in possibility, I’m writing about it now.

Whether we have vows or not, whether our work is out in the world or in the fullness of our individual lives, I think this point of view is tremendously valuable to have in this particular moment. We need to have an orientation of life that points us towards a horizon, that can ride the waves of apathy and despair. Within ourselves and alongside each other, we must gather enough space to hold what is dying and what is being born.

It’s easy to succumb to the sense that nothing we do matters, or that the suffering in our world is too much to overcome. In fact, the struggle to resist that temptation is the great struggle of our time: a fight to retain the core of our humanity, to believe in the love and compassion that is inherent in each of us. Power, and the hunger for it, has grown so large that those who hold it are trying to snuff out any feeling of hope for something better. We are being told that innocent people deserve to die, that we should be afraid of each other, that we should give up and let those with power determine our fate. Living in quiet submission, insensitive to our conscience, simply trying to survive on our own, is what allows that influence to grow.

The journey ahead is long, and the way is often dark. There’s no getting around how difficult this time is, or how many more will continue to suffer. The work is inexhaustible, the needs are numberless. We can commit to doing the work anyway.

As we do so, it’s important to have motivations that serve us beyond fear and worry. This work is not necessarily a bitter striving towards a harsh conclusion. The work is nurturing, flowering, opening, enlightening. It’s poetry, music, celebration, and rest. It’s writing, reading, searching for things that your heart wants to discover. It’s cultivating a life that encourages you to grow, instead of numbing you into a standstill.

When we commit to our wholeness, no matter what or how that looks like, we invest in something more personal, more authentic. It is spacious enough to respect who we are, and show something meaningful to the world around us. In that space, we can hold the vulnerability and grief of our present, and the enduring belief in our future.

Personally, I’ve never subscribed to the idea of impossibility. Anyone who says something is impossible has never bothered to find that out for themselves. Especially in my work, at the bedside and in those liminal spaces of illness and dying, I’ve seen things that simply cannot account for the idea of the impossible. There’s more at work in this world, currents of life that are much deeper than pain and suffering.

For the sake of our wellbeing and the wellbeing of all, it is our profound responsibility to discover what’s possible. It will only work when we show up and take part in it. The sorrows and difficulties of this world are not going away, but neither is our humanity. Let us suspend all doubt and see what it’s like to enter, to serve, and to become.

When my parents adopted me from Colombia at six weeks old, I am certain they did so with good intentions. I am fortunate to know enough about my birth mother to understand that her wishes for me were similar: a desire for me to have a better life, a more spacious opportunity. From my understanding, their shared vision of America was one which could give me something that, perhaps, a life in Colombia could not.

While I cannot know what might exist in that parallel universe, I can say that I have been offered the encouragement, ability, and nurturing to explore everything about myself and my place in the world. My life in the US has been a freedom of opportunity, expressing many of the chances that we think of when we invoke the “American Dream”.

At the same time, since the age of four (my age when 9/11 happened), I have rarely known a life in this country without crisis. The energy and optimism of my youth has been tested by endless wars, growing inequality, a planet being burned for money. Periods of relative peace have been few, and my generation has often had to put aside its deeper needs to do the important work of justice, fighting to maintain the values of an equitable and peaceful world.

I’ve been privileged enough to remain relatively protected by these disasters, both here and abroad. When war came to my family’s door and sent my father to Iraq, my mom made his deployment feel like a passing phase. If my parents were affected by the 2008 market crash, they didn’t show it. I have not had to flee my home, lose possessions, or face targeted physical violence. Even as a Hispanic person, the racism in my life has largely been in the form of micro-aggressions, never escalating into something more dangerous.

By the time I reached high school, however, I realized that the American ideals of my upbringing did not translate to the realities of many of my neighbors. A combination of my lived experience, awareness of history, and witnessing our national life threw me into a realization: that America was not as kind or generous as perhaps my parents hoped it would be. I had been brought to a land that refused to face its own origins, and that ignorance festered in the heart of its people. That ignorance became fear, fear became anger, and anger often exploded into bigotry and cruelty. I began to feel estranged, unwanted even, a trespasser on land that shuddered with conflict.

Even before ICE descended on the Twin Cities of my upbringing, inviting unprecedented violence and chaos on its neighborhoods, I had been grieving recently what might have been. What I might have done, or what many of us could have been able to do, if we were not so consumed by the relentless greed and boiling hatred incited by a few. I have been mourning a world that’s struggled to become, a world in which we all might have lived in peace, seen each other more clearly, loved with an openness which we all deserve.

I have badly wanted life to have been otherwise. It is not.

I’ve struggled to find the words to express my grief for what is happening in Minnesota right now, and what it reflects in our country. I felt the urge to jump in with everyone else, to respond with something immediate and passionate, but the language would not come. My grief was so close, and my anger burned too hot. Everything in me wants to be there right now, alongside neighbors in the streets. It is painful to watch from afar.

Renee Good’s horrific death at the hands of ICE agents are not the first at the whim of this administration. I fear it will not be the last. There is a clear and open intent to terrorize Americans, to secure our submission by force. We are standing in both a heartbreaking place and a critical juncture of our history. We may hesitate to accept the gravity of this moment, or seek to avoid the discomfort of its urgency, but there is no going around it.

This government, as it stands today, does not exist to protect me. It does not care for my safety, my welfare, or that of my community. It does not want me to think freely, speak openly, or demonstrate concern for those around me. If I were killed today by an ICE agent, an excuse would be made for it. I could be called a domestic terrorist, a professional agitator, an enemy of America. Death would be deserved. This government wants my silence, my complicity, my unwavering loyalty no matter how many laws are broken or rights are trampled. I am expected to bend my knee, and to be grateful for those who attack my neighbors with impunity. As a naturalized citizen, I’m also aware that there’s an interest in reducing my own status.

As far as I’m concerned, that is not a political position: that’s a position of conscience. For Americans, each of us must look inside and ask: what are you willing to risk for the life you want? Is the value of your life found on your own, or alongside your neighbor? What is the true cost of peace, of wellbeing, of being whole? When your own government gasses your street, beats your child’s teacher, kidnaps people in your community, what does your heart say? Will you look this moment in the eye, or look away?

These are not things to merely ponder safely in our homes, because the answers are being decided in the avenues of Minneapolis and beyond.

I think it’s important to give ourselves a moment for heartbreak, for quiet moments of shock and sorrow. We are living lives that are asking us to carry on as the very fabric of our shared existence is being purposefully unraveled. It is not human to deny your feelings, in any capacity. We need tender spaces to grieve where we are and what is happening.

I hope you give yourself that chance, even for a moment. Perhaps even now, as you read this, there could be an opportunity to pause and invite that space for yourself. Doing so reminds us that we care, that we value life, and that we ultimately want better (far better), for ourselves and for others.

There is a time for that, but we also cannot linger there. A conscience that cannot act is perhaps no conscience at all, unwilling to sacrifice the comfort of self-preservation. All that we love and hope for in this world must include our presence, our participation.

For perhaps too long in America we have vainly hoped our lives would be passively protected. By whom or what we probably couldn’t say: just the small yearning for someone else to figure it out, for life to go on, for things to quietly go away and no longer intrude on our hearts. From my perspective, at least, that protection has rarely been the case, and certainly isn’t now. To be passive in the face of such obvious and naked aggression, especially at the hands of your own government, is to give up one’s rights in silence.

On the national stage, we are being led by weak, confused, insecure people. People who cannot hear anything except their own cruel thoughts, driven by a lack of empathy and the dark pleasure of watching others be hurt. Their power is frightening, and their willingness to lie and deceive without limit. We should not be afraid of them.

I am not afraid of ICE, or this administration, or anyone who claims that its brutality is legitimate. I will not accept the idea that to resist them is un-American. To approve state violence and justify murder is an act of cowardice, a failure of will. It’s a betrayal of an inner honesty, allowing one’s consciousness to be occupied and abandoned to a hollow selfishness.

I do not know how all of this ends. What I do know is that, perhaps foolishly, I still believe in the America that my parents wanted for me. Every person detained, beaten, abused, and killed by ICE are my kin. Every person on the street, putting their bodies on the line for their community, is a guardian for our future. The courage, compassion, and profound determination of everyday citizens demonstrates what we are capable of and the way through this darkness. The resilience of Minnesota and communities across America is far more powerful than the increasingly desperate attempts to convince us to comply and turn against each other.

I grieve this moment, but not because I believe our future is decided.

The wholeness of our lives, and our nation, can only thrive in our ability to see one another. To be human is to be connected, to challenge ourselves and grow in the presence of others. Anyone who tells you to be afraid of your neighbor, to approve their abuse, to celebrate their death, is someone who would deny you your own humanity. That is an ask to live within someone else’s fearful existence, not your own.

As we grieve what is, as we mourn what could have been, we must also empower ourselves and each other to bring what we love into being. That world lives within us, among us, in no other moment but this one. However badly we may want things to be otherwise, it is necessary, for now, to understand that they are not.

I’d like to finish with something shared with me from the daughter of a patient of mine. It gave me pause, and may it be an offering for our lives as we face this moment.

I have been through a lot. A lot of people hurt me in the past, and I have felt alone. But I don’t hate them. I can’t have hatred in my heart. If I let hatred live there, the only person who gets hurt is me.

Dear friends-I sincerely thank you for your patience. It has been some time since I’ve written here. I’ve had much transition in my life, namely into a new space in my profession as a spiritual counselor. I now serve in the setting of hospice, making home visits and offering support to people at the end of life. It’s an environment of care that I’ve been interested in for a long time, and I’ve found its early days to already be rich experiences of meaning and wonder.

It’s an incredible thing, to be allowed into someone’s home at the end of their life. There’s a vulnerability and relational power there that is hard to describe. The opportunity to cross a threshold and ask about someone’s life is something that I’ve found incredibly humbling, both as a professional and a person. The question of “Who am I to do this?'“ often comes to mind, but this isn’t a doubt creeping in. It’s an awareness of time and space: someone’s whole life, and my relatively shorter one, crossing years and places and experiences, to now coincide at the very end. What are we to make of that? The answers have been rewarding in their open-ended character. They feel like lamps to follow on the path of life, rather than places to land.

I also have taken time to reflect on my relationship with writing, which has been more complicated than I’ve realized. With that reflection comes a confession: I’m not sure I’ve been fully honest with myself. Writing is something that I’ve been told that I’m good at, but I’ve never quite heard myself in what’s written. I’ve been wondering about why that is, and that wonder has delivered some hard but important truths.

I think I often write in fear of being exclusive. I have wanted my writing to be complete, so as to be accessible to everyone. Sitting at the table, I often think less of who might resonate with my thoughts and more so of who would feel awkward, angry, or bored with what I’m saying. I’ve been highly motivated to appeal to those who have been disenfranchised with what I write about, about wholeness and the human journey and (dare I say it) spirituality. Each sentence has carried an awareness of how that sentence might be criticized. Every idea already contains its own internal scrutiny. Every post has gone to trial with itself. “What would someone who’s suspicious about this topic say?” “What sort of whataboutism would jump in here?” “Am I being accessible enough, or am I leaving something out?” “How might someone find fault in this?”

Coupled with this urge to appeal is the fear of impressing a sense of being right. The truth is, I don’t think I’m necessarily right about anything I’ve written down. To be right isn’t the point, but it is a motivation in the spaces I’m writing in. In a world in which truth becomes increasingly insecure and manipulated, I have a fear of claiming what is true for me. Particularly in the modern spiritual milieu, there are many who claim to be right, to have the closest relationship to truth itself. I’m suspicious of those people and simultaneously worry about becoming associated with that kind of character.

We’re living in a time where everyone wants to be right. About themselves, about the world, about how to live in it. The more correct you seem, to more appealing and interesting you become. Those who appear to have the firmest grip on certainty might confirm something about ourselves, and there’s reassurance in that.

Being right feels like solid ground. When you’re right, you don’t have to do anything else. The job’s done. You can sit there and tell other people what to do, and there aren’t any questions left to ask. Certainty allows us to feel safe, confident, and in control.

Curiously, I have found more confidence and trust in the experience of uncertainty. I think my truth is that the deeper I go into my life, the less sure I become about anything. At one point I believed this was doubt, but now I’m discovering it’s something else entirely.

I’ve realized that I’m not seeking to know, I’m seeking how to walk. I want to learn what it means to be steady in life, to be clear in how I am, to embrace the world as it is. I’m not concerned with being right, I’m concerned about connecting, understanding, belonging. How can I continue to open up? What else is there to discover about my own existence? How does that bring me closer to others? I want to ask better questions, not deliver perfect answers.

I’ve been wrong quite a bit in recent times: not exclusively in terms of doing things incorrectly, but simply by experiencing change. What I thought in the beginning, becomes something else in the end. I started doing things one way, only to realize that it may be better done in another. Our culture often treats that as a personal failure, and I’ve definitely internalized it as such. Somehow, we expect ourselves to do things perfectly the first time, to be flawless before we’ve even begun. I’ve treated my writing in a similar fashion. I’m working to unlearn that, because that approach leaves out important parts of who I am.

Internalizing adjustment as failure and uncertainty as doubt has created an inflexibility in my thinking. I’ve been withholding myself in my writing because I fear giving the impression that I’ve somehow figured things out. I want my words to feel as invitational as they can, and the urge to be spacious has, paradoxically, created a rigid need to be polished and unassailable. Every sentence has to say enough without saying too much. You want to bring people in, but you don’t want to push them away.

What’s most interesting to me is that I approach my work in a completely different way. As a spiritual counselor, I drawn upon an immediacy and honesty that is not only beneficial, but necessary. When people are suffering, or dying, you can’t beat around the bush or find the perfect way to bring them closer to what’s happening. You have to trust who you are, and what speaks through you.

A few weeks ago, I called the daughter of an elderly patient coming onto hospice, dying of metastatic cancer. After I had introduced myself and my role, she launched into a vendetta against her experience of God. Even through the phone, I could physically feel her anger. She blamed God for killing her mom, for the impending separation, for the abandonment that would soon follow. She told me that after her mother died, she would probably never believe in God again.

You can’t prepare for a conversation like that. There’s no such thing as polish. You just have to listen, and be there, and trust the words will follow. That’s exactly what I did, and it led to a powerful conversation with this woman after scheduling a visit in her home. We walked around her housing complex, and she cried, vented, berated. She mourned both the grief of her present and the grief to come. Our conversation had nothing to do with the “right” way through this, or giving advice, or finding some kind of solution. In fact, a solution didn’t even exist at the time. Her mom was dying, she could not accept that, and her experience of God was silent, absent, cruelly unavailable. There was no way around it: that was the path for both of us to walk on.

It was through embracing uncertainty together that allowed us to draw closer to this woman’s life, and what eventually led to her acceptance and quietly renewed curiosity about God once again. Towards the end of our time together, she told me “I can tell you really believe in Him”. This startled me at first-I hadn’t said anything about my own beliefs. I can tell you honestly, I don’t know what I think, as God for me remains an open question, another path to follow for probably a lifetime. I didn’t really know what to say in the moment.

Then I realized: she wasn’t talking about me. She was talking about herself.

I don’t want to give you the impression that I’ve been intentionally misleading about anything I’ve written about until now. I don’t think I’ve been dishonest-I’ve been chronically hesitant. I haven’t fully said what I’ve wanted to say, because I’ve been afraid to say it completely. I’ve feared the specter of scrutiny, from outside and within myself. It’s been a bit like being afraid of my own shadow.

I think it’s important for me to cross the threshold of writing with the same willingness that I have out in the world. I am able to do this because I’m uncertain: I don’t know what’s going to happen every time I enter someone’s home, but I trust that something can happen that will matter.

I hear myself better in this. In the end, I’ve only wanted to write things that allow people to hear themselves, too. I don’t want to write for appreciation, but for connection. To offer something not as a confirmation of myself, but to open more doors to self-discovery.

As we enter another year, and we reflect on what might change or be made different, may we all encounter things that invite greater honesty and courage into ourselves.

Welcome to the first post of The Raft Project’s On Board series. In these selections, I am pleased to introduce different voices into this project’s ongoing conversation on wholeness. May these perspectives and mediums add continued inspiration, insight, and meaningful reflection.

Any words in italics are my own, in the interest of centering the voice of the featured author. An introduction is available at the end of the post.

Break Again

After your home’s gone there remains a stamp in the ground where your soul once stood.

What do you pick up from the rubble of the ruined house? What do you lift to your chest like a precious piece of what was? And how, if possible, do you make of it what will be?

There is room for praising war. For how it levels us into the ground of our common humanity, from which we might wake stunned, remembering again who we are; one lonely species traversing the endless dark sky, suspended by the light between grief and despair. What else is there to say?

Everything worth loving breaks. Everything worthy of praise supplicates our tired knees to the dirt, our tongue to the sound of its arising quiver. How all things dance. How all things dance their way towards restoration. The brokenness of this world is cause for celebration. How else will we realize that we are each other if not for that tenderness which joins our suffering? How else does love come into view if not for the ruptured spaces between things?

You’ve been broken, and so have I. It doesn’t matter how, only that we have. Let the story of your breaking wash with history. Pay attention here, instead. Sure all things die, but tell me what brought you alive again. Tell me what revived your bereaved heart? Tell me how water lifted again to your lips from your mother’s cupped hands, and what it felt like to admit your needs. Redemption doesn’t have to be violent, just kind. Anyway, I cannot redeem my pain so long as yours stands exposed. I cannot fully restore so long as you still seek. And though we’ll continue like this – breaking, mending, and breaking again – we can at last find solace in each other.

So when you break I’ll spill a river from my tongue into your eyes, and when I break you’ll wrap your heart around my wounds, and when the earth breaks we’ll sing and dance her back into wholeness.

This is the narrative, the story, the pulse; we fall, then stand. We forget, then wake. We break, then mend, and then we break again.

Moudi’s words feel like an exhale to me-a reminder that the journey towards being whole is more spacious than perfection, more flexible than being upright. We do not have to be put together in order to seek fullness in our lives. We are all carrying hurts, worries, insecurities-there is relief to be found in placing them in each other’s open hands.

True courage to live in this world comes from vulnerability. When we acknowledge that our lives depend on each other, that our wholeness includes the wellbeing of all, we step out of isolation and into the heart of life itself. This heart will break and heal a thousand times over-but it’s a heart that beats truly. There’s enough space here for us to acknowledge what hurts, to love between that hurting-and commit to that love with even greater resolve.

Our Passing Existence

everything passes, everything changes - Bob Dylan

What I find precious is what I know to be brief. The 
seconds of breath that compose a cycle, the purple 
lilies climbing up the trellis outside the front door of 
my rented home, the curry I cooked and shared with 
my Buddhist Turkish neighbor. They say that in five 
billion years, the sun, in the center of this solar system, 
will run out of hydrogen. The Earth will grow cold by 
then, its geography unrecognizable, languaged by its 
slow separation. Everything passes, everything 
changes. Not just our sprouting lives which gasp for 
maybe a hundred years across canyons of dying stars, 
but also the taken for granted memories we assume 
will outlive us, by a lineage of seconds; the lover I 
greet daily arriving into my arms, the seemingly long 
stretch of war’s elegy, this obedient heart I claim as 
mine. To love you must already grieve. I keep praying 
that we may wake to the dirge of our passing existence. 
So possible and sad, so beautiful and real, so abundant 
with greed, so forgivable, so green. The glistening sun 
still singing. Determined to step into the eternal here.

About

Hi everyone. My name is Moudi Sbeity. I am a Lebanese-American author, poet, and transpersonal psychotherapist. I was born in Texas and raised in Lebanon, but moved to the United States at the age of eighteen as an evacuee following the 2006 July war. In Utah, I founded and operated Laziz Kitchen, a Lebanese restaurant celebrated by the New York Times as “the future of queer dining.” I was also a named plaintiff in Kitchen v. Herbert, the landmark case that brought marriage equality to Utah and the 10th circuit states in 2014. I am also a person who stutters, and feel passionate about writing and poetry as practices in fluency and self-expression. Growing up stuttering helped cultivate my fascination with the creationary power of speech and language, and the importance of being honest and intentional with words. My writing focuses on themes of language, war, belonging, queer identities, and narrative, all pointing towards the possibility of justice and liberation through a spiritual framework of compassion, forgiveness, and awe. Central to my work is the question of what it means to be alive together in an impermanent world, and so gratitude, and the necessity of beauty. I have two books coming out next year; A poetry collection titled Want A World (Fernwood Press, 2026), and a memoir, Habibi Means Beloved (University of Utah Press), that touches on themes of sufism, queerness, and belonging.

More of Moudi:

On Substack: Habibi Means Beloved

Instagram: @moudi.sbeity for poetry and updates regarding future publications

A recent interview with Moudi on his experience of the intersections between grief and poetry:

Listen on Spotify

View on Substack

A life’s journey is never a solitary affair. It may feel otherwise, but we are constantly shaped by the presence of others around us. We like to think that we can do things completely on our own, that our individuality is the highest expression of who we are, but this is only one part of the story. While each of us is unique, with our own gifts and abilities, these gifts are not meant to be exclusive. One of the great joys of being alive is to use who and what we are in relationship with others.

At the same time, life is becoming an increasingly compressed and isolated experience. If we wanted to, we could live among people without ever interacting with them. Many of us do this-we live in apartments and neighborhoods without knowing who lives around us, and can have anything we want delivered to our door without seeing another face. When basic needs can be outsourced and connections dominated by who we encounter through a screen, our personal distance between other people only grows wider. In the march towards convenience, disconnection becomes more intense, and the experience of genuine community more foreign to us.

In many ways, it’s becoming harder to see each other, to embrace the vulnerability of knowing and being known.

When I began The Raft Project, I never intended it to focus solely on my own writing. I am a single voice among many, a few pages in a much larger conversation and story. I have my own sense of things, but I’m equally invested in learning about how that awareness is occupied by other perspectives, ideas, and imaginations.

The truth is that we’re not alone-it only appears that way. The metaphor of the raft begins in a place of apparent detachment: trying to find our way towards wholeness, seeking out who and what we are through the lens of our own experience. Adrift at sea, journeying through the mystery of life’s unfolding, it can sometimes feels like there isn’t anyone else out there. The horizon is empty, the waves of daily life our sole companion. We carry on and do the best we can, with the quiet hope that someday we’ll see another ship or discover a distant shore.

Eventually, we see another mast, the glimpse of a sail on an open ocean. The realization that there are others out there is a relief unlike any other. To know that there are companions, perhaps others who can share and guide us, is an encouragement to keep going.

Until now, I have been sharing about what exists on my own raft-what keeps me afloat, what I use to continue, what sustains me as I grow. At the same time, I’ve encountered other rafts on my journey, other people at sail who have built something in their own way. These encounters have offered invaluable gifts in my life, sharing experience in a way that has increased my knowledge of what’s possible and what I can draw from as I continue on my passage.

While I will continue writing from my own perspective, I’m excited to open up a new phase of this project, one that I’ve been anticipating from the beginning. The On Board series is an opportunity to weave in other voices in our continued reflection on what makes us whole, and what can lead us there.

The beauty of wholeness is in its diversity. There are many pathways towards it, currents of all kinds that can inspire us to discover and invest in our own expression. Not only does this diversity reflect life itself, but it also offers a source of constant inspiration, opportunities to witness how this happens and connect with what this means for us.

I look forward to taking time to share examples of those who are being guided by their own currents. I hope to include voices of all kinds: across experiences, embodiments, and ideas that widen our understanding of wholeness itself. I may be in conversation with these voices, in complement, or simply allow them to exist on their own, another raft in the crossing of life.

My next post will be the opening publication in this series. I’m excited to see where it takes us, and what it might encourage for both our personal and collective sense of the journey. I hope that it offers a reminder that we are not alone, that more is possible for us, and that there is so much to be discovered in one another.

In my kitchen, I have a copy of a calligraphy piece created by one of my teachers, the late Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh.

I’ve had this piece displayed in my home for a long time, and I keep it within view for more than just aesthetic reasons. Over the years, the art has become a kind of teacher for me in its own right. Its central message, simply and plainly stated, has been poking, prodding, and provoking me on almost a daily basis. It brings out a whole range of reactions, from annoyance to ease, inner quiet to confusion.

Lately, I’ve been in a season of irritation when looking at it. Really? Peace in myself, peace in the world? I have days where my teacher’s words feel like they couldn’t be further from reality. How could that be possible?

I’m irritated because I don’t feel like I’m getting it. The ache of living in a country that wages unrelenting and borderline enthusiastic violence upon the world and its own people feels like a sore throat I can’t shake, one that seems to get worse by the day. The President publicly fantasizes about attacking American cities, while his departments terrorize families and kidnap people with impunity. Children can’t go to school without the fear of being ripped apart by assault weapons. Billions of dollars are poured into murdering and starving civilians in Gaza, billions more into destabilizing countries that won’t toe the line of American exceptionalism. The approval and, at times, celebration that this appears to encourage in some people is genuinely disturbing.

Peace in oneself, peace in the world. Not a chance. I am safe enough in my immediate experience to have moments of peace, but these moments have felt uneasy and fitful. On my low days, peace feels like guilt, like stolen time, like a reprieve paid for in blood. I struggle to relax when everything around me feels like its in a constant state of collapse. Some lyrics from the band Fleet Foxes might capture this anxiety better than I can:

More than I had in mind

More than I wish I knew

And now it’s near on me

Some rush of red fear

And my worst old times look fine from here

The eagerness with which we seek to harm our world, combined with the mental gymnastics required to carry on as if this is all somehow acceptable, bearable, normal, feels like a dizzying descent. In every respect, it is the exact opposite of a peaceful experience.

Pause. Deep breath. I turn back to the calligraphy, taking stock of its smooth, patient brushstrokes. The calm inherent in its creation is both apparent and unnerving.

I am reminded, as I’ve written about before, that this artwork was created by a man who witnessed firsthand the total destruction of his homeland (Vietnam), the slaughter of his people, and almost a lifetime of exile for his own peace-making efforts. This message, six words in deceptively plain form, comes not out of lofty privilege or flimsy optimism, but from a deep knowledge of suffering and unimaginable pain.

Villages bombed, thousands killed, war unending and futures poisoned-these are words that do not emerge from light places.

But how? How do you go from catastrophe to such patient confidence?

Back to the calligraphy again. The order of operations feels important. It’s not “Peace in the world, peace in oneself.” The invitation is to begin with our own experience.

Thich Nhat Hanh often talked about life as a garden, in which every thought, word, and action we have represents a seed planted in our consciousness. It’s a fairly simple concept: the seeds we plant take root, and we water those seeds through habit and repetition. I’ll let him describe it in his own words:

“Your mind is like a piece of land planted with many different kinds of seeds: seeds of joy, peace, mindfulness, understanding, and love; seeds of craving, anger, fear, hate, and forgetfulness. These wholesome and unwholesome seeds are always there, sleeping in the soil of your mind. The quality of your life depends on the seeds you water. If you plant tomato seeds in your gardens, tomatoes will grow. Just so, if you water a seed of peace in your mind, peace will grow. When the seeds of happiness in you are watered, you will become happy. When the seed of anger in you is watered, you will become angry. The seeds that are watered frequently are those that will grow strong.” 

It’s difficult for us to establish new patterns, and because we are always thinking/speaking/acting, there are thousands (millions!) of these ‘seeds’ being planted every day. While the idea seems straightforward, the consequences are extraordinary. It’s one of the reasons that paying attention (mindfulness) to what we say, think, and do is of paramount importance in Thich Nhat Hanh’s teachings and the Buddhist lineage he represents.

What am I planting right now? It gives me pause to think about moments in my day. I notice that I’m often having angry, judgmental thoughts when I’m scrolling through a news reel. When I’m feeling stressed or overwhelmed, I can be short with my fiancee, planting seeds of hurt or miscommunication.

I notice the flash of warmth I feel when wishing a cashier a good day in the checkout line. I plant seeds of kindness when helping a parent carry their child’s stroller up the subway stairs. Accepting an apology with forgiveness, even if I still feel discomfort, waters a seed of understanding.

It might be helpful to consider both what is happening, and not happening in these vignettes. When I’m doomscrolling on my phone, I feel frustrated, lethargic, and helpless. The rest of my day can be distracted, unmotivated, or filled with consumption to ease the mess of painful feelings.

Stressed and overwhelmed, I’m ungrounded and not taking care of my words or actions. I might say things that are sharp and irritated, acting out my emotions on people who haven’t done anything to create that stress. The world around me feels more exhausting, the people in them more burdensome.

When I’m meeting people on the street with kindness, I’m treating them with a basic sense of respect and dignity. I’m not seeking to make their lives worse, and there may even be an opportunity to make it better. For all I know, they’re having a hard time, and some kindness may help to lighten difficulties that I’m unaware of.

The point is that everything we do affects the world. We should not underestimate the potency of how we show up. The what and how of our thoughts, words, and actions don’t just make up our individual experience-they contribute directly to the world we live in.

This carries deeper consequence than checkout lines and scrolling on our phones. If we zoom way out, we might find it easy to distance ourselves from people that we find particularly cruel or indifferent to the suffering of others. “How can they be like that?”, we wonder. “How do they think their choices are acceptable?”. We can reassure ourselves with the notion that we would never end up like that, or would never accept a way of life that thrives on hurting other people.

We may want to rethink creating that psychological distance. In fact, I don’t think any of us are that far removed from becoming someone invested in making other people suffer, myself included. It’s not because there’s something inherently wrong with us-it’s because the quality of our consciousness is that potent. We’re profoundly sensitive to what influences us, and everything we do creates a momentum we have to take responsibility for.

Every seed in our mind takes fruit, no matter what it is. Moment to moment, we can take on attitudes, behaviors, and identities that we may not even realize are shaping our way of being in the world. Before we know it, we can become someone completely different.

It’s part of the reason why wars start, genocides happen and civil rights begin to ebb. These are not arbitrary events that occur randomly or without precedence. Step by step, day by day, we can nurture seeds of avoidance, hatred, ignorance, and indifference. These seeds lead to attitudes and decisions that have real impact, whether those decisions involve doing something or not doing something. Today you might volunteer for your local school, tomorrow you’re voting for someone’s rights to be taken away. If we’re not paying attention to how we live our lives, we can sleepwalk into a deeply confused and harmful future.

This is not a reason for paranoia, or to decide that we should rigidly monitor every aspect of our lives. We’re all going to have harsh thoughts at some point. The tension of conflict is unavoidable. We will speak in ways that are hurtful. We’ll act in ways that create harm within ourselves, or in our relationships.

Let’s go back to the calligraphy again. Knowing what we know now, does this change how we experience it?

For me, it changes the way that I think about peace. It is no longer a concept for the future, but an action for now. What if peace is not a possibility for the future? What if it never has been? What if it can only be now, must be now, is only available in this moment?

Placing peace in the present moment re-frames what we do with it. Inevitably, it means we have to consider how to activate peace in the presence of violence, harm, and injustice. We are called to take a deeper account of our own actions, and how we carry that into how we live our lives.

I’ve heard the phrase “protecting my peace” used a lot lately. It refers to the sense that we need to keep things that are tiring, uncomfortable, or difficult at arms length, for the sake of maintaining our sanity and ability to move through life. While I’d agree that it doesn’t help to be overexposed, the phrase has always struck me as somewhat avoidant of reality. If peace needs to be protected, then that implies it has to be blocked off from other things that are already happening in the world. If peace can’t embrace the world, then what good is it?

If peace within ourselves becomes the peace felt in the world, then why build a border around it? I don’t think this does us any good, and might even be complicit in allowing the pain in our world to continue. How can we use peace in the presence of conflict itself?

Let’s use anger as one example of conflict. In my work as a chaplain, I’ve sat with a lot of anger. Oftentimes, I become a symbol for the things my patients are angry about: the health system, a relationship that failed them, the bad things that the Divine has done or not done in their lives.

Of course, I wouldn’t allow for any direct verbal abuse. But it was always interesting to watch what could happen when I would make space for a person’s inner turmoil and conflict to express itself. Allowing them to complain, grieve, and vent without judgment showed that I was a new kind of connection-one that did not seek to extend or amplify their hurt.

Sometimes, people would expect me to meet their fire with fire. I’ve had patients who have tried to start fights, or test my willingness to endure behavior they knew wasn’t useful for either of us. When they realized I wasn’t going to fight them, that in fact I was genuinely interested in their concerns and wanted to listen, something would shift. There was a sense of relaxation, an opening, a chance to have a different kind of conversation.

The peace I brought into the room, and the shared world of healing, would more often than not open a door into a new path of relationship for the both of us. For myself, I came to learn that anger is almost always the wounded slashing of sadness. Anger defends the vulnerability of grief, believing that the world will not make space for the tenderness of feeling unloved, unheard, or uncared for.

Showing my patients that their anger was valid, and that I sensed hurt behind it, was powerful and sometimes revolutionary. While it might seem obvious to some of us, many have never considered that their real desire is not to hurt others, but to be held and feel connected to the world around them. Their own calligraphy might read, “Pain in myself, pain in the world.” Making space for that, listening deeply and bringing a peaceful presence to angry stories, allowed for conflict to transform. Anger runs on limited oxygen: eventually, it exhausts itself, giving space for the pain underneath it to receive careful attention.

If I didn’t feel particularly peaceful, it wasn’t quite the same experience. Whether acknowledged or not, my patients could sense a lack of unconditional openness or space in the room. With less energy to embody that compassionate presence, it was easier to feel annoyed, frustrated, or indifferent to peoples’ stories. There were less opportunities for the both of us to do the deep work of healing together.

Peace in oneself, peace in the world.

I still have a sore throat. I feel unsettled by the disintegrating social contract, our apparent refusal to acknowledge that we can only continue if we endeavor with and for each other. I’m not sure how all of this ends, and the current direction doesn’t seem particularly encouraging.

Then again, I recall the words of Thich Nhat Hanh himself:

“You are not an observer. You are a participant.”

Whatever violence, rage, and turmoil exists in this world, I must count myself within it. I have to reconcile my place in what happens, whether it agrees with me or not. This means making a deep commitment to cultivating peace in my thoughts, my words, my actions. I refuse to add to the confusion that already exists-my life must be a vehicle for healing, not another weapon in the arsenal of destruction and disregard.

Without exception, peace has to be my practice. Not an avoidant peace, which protects a false sense of security and wages its own kind of silent violence. Real peace is something that we can touch, that is nurtured in what we say and how we move through the world. It’s a peace that can speak with courage when called upon, and refuses to be goaded when chaos comes looking for a fight. This peace embraces discomfort, builds trust, does not look the other way, and demonstrates a desire to care for others as we care for ourselves.

We have to make peace come alive in the world, and not treat it with a cozy idealism. Everything has consequence and, in many cases, peoples’ lives depend on it. Peace is meaningful action. There has to be a way to embody it, to channel our frustrations and fears differently. It doesn’t seem all that helpful to grease the wheel that’s already spinning.

If we all we feel within us is anger and despair, then the world becomes only that: angry and hopeless. If I am at war in myself, then I will make war in the world. My mind will become a harmful place, and I will inflict harm on people around me.

We can’t wait around for peace to show up one day in a distant future. It has to come from somewhere, which means it can only come from us. Whatever nurtures peace within ourselves, however we plant those seeds, our world is demanding more of those gardeners.

I know that I need them. The peace in me, seeks the peace in you.

Ride your horse along the edge of the sword

Hide yourself in the middle of the flames

Blossoms of the fruit tree will bloom in fire

The sun rises in the evening.

-Zen proverb

Dedicated in living memory and deep gratitude to my patients and their families, my teachers at the bedside.

It’s a Sunday evening and I’ve put a brine on the stove to simmer: bay leaves, white wine, celery. The flavors and vapor are curling through my kitchen, and I’ve just sat down on the couch with a book that’s taken me too long to finish.

I haven’t been reading for more than five minutes before my work phone flashes, and the on-call tone tears through the gentle silence of my apartment. Setting my book down on the coffee table, I unlock my phone and take a look at the message.

15 minutes later, I am dressed in business casual and waiting for a car to take me across the city to the hospital. A 12 year-old in the pediatric intensive care unit is on life support, and the medical team has just informed her family that there isn’t anything else that can be done. Without the machines keeping her alive, she would likely pass in a matter of minutes. Her mother has just agreed to sign the papers consenting to removal of care, and they are looking for a chaplain for support.

It’s a long ride in, and so I have time to look through the medical chart and prepare for the visit ahead. In speaking with the nurse who placed the call, the patient’s Mom and older sister are at the bedside. They’re Catholic, and Mom only speaks Spanish. I read through some of the most recent notes in the chart, and look for some Catholic end-of-life prayers for children in the Spanish language.

When I make it to the unit, the doors to the child’s room are closed. Flowers and loving messages from staff are written in erasable marker on the entrance from floor to ceiling. A nurse is standing outside, typing into a computer. I approach and introduce myself, and he looks relieved to see me. “Hi, thank you so much for coming. Mom and sister are inside, they’re expecting you.”

“Anything I should know before going in? When are they planning to remove care?”

“Not sure, the doctors just met with them. It will be soon, though. Probably within the next 24 hours.”

I thank the nurse for his time, and he moves on to another task elsewhere on the unit. I take a second to pause in front of the room. I don’t have the slightest idea of what I’m going to say, and I don’t know what’s going to happen next. Taking a deep breath, I strap on a surgical mask, and gently slide open the double door.

This summer, I completed a residency in clinical spiritual care at a major hospital system in New York City. Its conclusion fulfills what has been a four year process of training, both clinically and academically, to operate professionally as a spiritual caregiver in the United States. This vocation is commonly known as chaplaincy, and its roots are in the Christian tradition, but now include the wide range of spiritual and religious embodiments that exist in this country. Personally, I come to this work as a Buddhist practitioner and as someone who identifies as interspiritual-meaning I am shaped and responsive to more than one source of spiritual wisdom.

I thought it would be worth it to spend some time reflecting on some of what I have seen, encountered, and learned during my time in this process. By my count, I’ve been at the bedside of over 1000 people. From every language, background and upbringing, I’ve walked with people through their darkest moments and their most hard-won triumphs. My training has taken me to every frontier and corner of the human experience: from intensive care units to emergency rooms, from amputations to strokes to cancer diagnoses. My patients have been as old as 98 and as young as 2 days. I have been there from the first day of admission, at every stage of illness and recovery, to the very end of life.

As I open these thoughts, it feels a little intimidating to write about. There are so many stories that I’d like to tell, so many moments I want to express. In writing, I can see my patients’ faces, recall the sound of their voices, feel the texture of their hands as I held them. It has been an experience unlike any other that I’ve had in my life- spending every day on the fragile edge of living and dying.

I suppose it is unusual to wake up every morning, get ready for the day like everyone else, and walk straight into what are often the worst moments of peoples’ lives. Looking back, I couldn’t really say what exactly has allowed me to do what I do, or how I was able to do it. In the moment, when I’m on the floor and in the middle of my work, it feels like the most natural, obvious thing in the world. In reflection, it’s as if there was another version of me, some kind of doppelgänger, who went in my place.

One thing that I know for sure is that it’s been the most important thing I’ve ever done. Not only through the work itself, but also in what I’ve encountered between myself and other people. What has motivated me more than anything else is the knowledge that everyone needs someone else at some point in their lives. We will never be fully independent, we cannot exist without each other. The world is not a room full of objects: it is a garden without borders, full of life and mystery and wonder. The chance to be a gardener in the bed of humanity has been gratifying, heartbreaking, and full of transformation.

Especially in this present moment, it feels important to share about what it’s like to be an intimate witness to suffering. At this time, suffering begs to be noticed and has become disturbingly easy to ignore. What I’ve seen in the hospital can’t be separated from what is happening in the world, in places like Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine, Darfur. There have been many days where I’ve walked through the front doors wondering what it would be like to do so under shellfire, to comfort the dying while missiles slam into walls. To help tend to those who are sick and wounded while they go for days, weeks, without food or water.

While I am incredibly grateful to have done this work out of harm’s way, I have also had to reckon with the harm that exists beyond the doors of the hospital itself. Saying goodbye at discharge, knowing that someone is going back to the shelter they didn’t want. Holding the awareness that my patient will be readmitted in a few weeks, because their insurance won’t let them afford the quality of care they deserve for a chronic illness. Delivering a copy of the Qur’an for someone who will be soon leaving, and returning to prison instead of going home.

We live in a time in which even the smallest discomfort has become unbearable, in a moment where our hearts are overwhelmed by the volume of violence and cruelty that suffocates our world. Everything around us is asking us to wake up to our humanity, and we are struggling to embrace the challenge of that call. There’s never been a more necessary time to face the reality of suffering, and our steps on that path have been uneasy.

Perhaps nothing makes us more uncomfortable than suffering. In the world of spiritual care, there is no time or option to retreat from its presence. In fact, we are asked to go directly towards it. A code is called on your unit, your on-call pager goes off while you’re cooking dinner, a consult for a dying patient comes in right as you’re walking off the floor for the day-countless times, you are tasked with showing up being present for whatever is unfolding, no matter how scary or challenging. It’s in those moments that you find out who you are, and what you can be.

It’s been a humbling experience to encounter this reality when it greets you on a daily basis. When you live your life next to death, everything inside you starts to change. Your walls lower, your eyes clear, your heart opens. What is truly important in life becomes intensely evident. There can be no defenses, no distractions, no opportunities to pretend. You have to be exactly who you are, because that’s what’s needed. When someone is sick, or dying, there’s no occasion to be anyone else.

I’m aware that this represents a rather extreme example of experiencing discomfort-and I’m not recommending this exposure as a necessary way to cultivate a deeper awareness of suffering, or the compassion that can respond. But I also know that each of us suffers, and that we have all lost something or someone that matters. I don’t think we should avoid how hard that is, because we are bound by a connection to this mutual experience. Growing closer to this shared reality might be where we can discover the gifts of being human.

This may sound like work and experience that operates on the periphery of normal life. For me, I’ve found that it exists at the heart of who we are and how we define ourselves as human beings. When I talk about what I do, people have often told me something like,

“That seems really intense. I don’t know how you can do that.”

The reply that I often have in my head is,

“Well, life is intense!”

What I have seen every day is a reflection of what we like to avoid and struggle to encounter on daily basis. We have enough conveniences and distractions to pretend it isn’t otherwise, but being human is an immense experience, and that has a certain quality of intensity. To be alive with a mind that thinks, a heart that cares, a consciousness that grows, is incredible. It’s weird and amazing and confusing and offers a lifetime of self-discovery. It is curious that an encounter with suffering: such as emergency, as illness, as dying, is often what unlocks an interest and exploration of that experience.

The realization of our own impermanence, that life is short and everything we cherish temporary, is frequently encountered not in moments of satisfaction, but when everything is suddenly falling apart. It is in those moments of collapse that chaplains enter. The question I’ve probably been asked the most is, “What exactly do you do?”. Perhaps the most straightforward answer is that I am a companion to the truth of who people are and what they’re experiencing. I listen, I guide, and comfort those who are going through tremendous challenge and transformation. I bear witness to their hurt, their hope, the depths of who they are and where they’re going. I attend to what gives them courage, and sit with what invites despair. Unlike my colleagues in the hospital system, who are exceptionally trained at addressing physical problems and finding solutions, I enter the unanswerable questions, the situations that can’t be solved.

“Am I ever going to get better?”

“What happens if this doesn’t go away?”

“How am I going to tell my kids that their Mom is sick?”

“Will God punish me for being angry?”

“What am I going to do after my husband dies?”

I can’t answer those questions-at least, not directly. What I love the most about this work is the experience of mutual discovery, journeying alongside people to find pathways into the questions themselves. People often look to chaplains as the keepers of sacred answers, whether they see us as people who speak for the divine or those who possess secrets reserved for the most vulnerable moments of life. While there is a certain kind of spiritual authority present in our care, it doesn’t place us above or beyond everyone else.

And, we don’t have any secrets (at least, I don’t!). Every time I knock at the door of a room, or poke my head around the curtain, I’m keenly aware that I’m stepping into a world that is entirely unknown to me. If my offer to visit is accepted, it’s always worth a moment to pause and remember that, even though I have access to this person’s medical chart, I don’t really know anything about them. My main tools are my curiosity and openness-and they are there to teach me about what’s happening to them. If there is a secret, it’s that they have the answers to their questions-not me.

It’s a relief not to have to act like you know everything, or that you should. While I offer guidance and counsel, I don’t give direct advice. I don’t make decisions for people, or tell them how to reach a conclusion. I don’t talk about my own spiritual beliefs, nor do I ask people to bend themselves towards what doesn’t suit them. I’m not there to tell people how to live, or how to die. The work of spiritual care is to be a mirror: so that people can see more of themselves, and ultimately more of what is most important to them. As I would often tell my patients, “I’m not here to represent anything other than what supports you. What matters to you, matters to me.”

I’ll never forget a family who consulted me because they wanted help deciding how to care for their mother at the end of her life. Her decision-makers were split between two children-one wanted to pursue hospice care, and the other wanted to continue life-preserving interventions.

Of course, I can’t make that kind of decision for someone. Instead, I invited them to reflect on their life with their Mom, how they were raised and the values that shaped who they were as a family. I came to learn that their father died in the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic-they had to say goodbye over the phone, and were not able to see him in the final days of his life. It was a decision that they did not have the luxury of choosing-and now, as they were coming to terms with their mother’s passing, they had an opportunity to reflect the care and compassion that had nurtured them.

In the middle of what is painful and heartbreaking, it has been life-changing to witness people find their answers and discover about who they are. Regardless of how they come to it, or under what circumstances, I have witnessed that discovery unlock a hope and resilience that has been able to meet even the deepest fear. Even in someone’s final moments, even when treatments have failed and families have gone home or speaking is no longer possible, I have witnessed people reconcile, accept, forgive, and love. There is a strength in us that is impossibly true.

There is immense confidence and perspective to be found when we embrace the mystery of being alive and everything that comes with it. Just because we don’t know something doesn’t mean life is threatening. It means we have a chance to find out, to expand and see what it’s like to be someone/encounter something different.

Someone recently asked me, “What do you do with all of those stories?”. My reply was that there’s one half of it-often the hardest part, the grief and despair and suffering, that you have to learn how to let go of. If you carry that part around with you, it only gets heavier, because it isn’t yours to hold. There is clarity in drawing close to suffering, you have to reach out and touch it-but you can’t hold onto it and take it with you. If you place that burden on yourself, it can become paralysis, making it difficult to carry on and keep showing up. You have honored the reality of suffering in your witness, your care and attention, but it’s a visitor who cannot stay.

The other half you likely keep with you forever, pieces of humanity arranged in your heart like a mosaic. The image of that mosaic, in my mind, is of a weaving and coming together. It shows me that things are not black and white, that there is something more enduring than suffering and death, a timeless reminder that everyone wants to love and be loved.

There is so much more than can be said, and I hope that I’ll be able to introduce more of this mosaic again in future writing. For now, I’ll offer some themes that have stuck with me the most:

People want to help and care for each other.

Time and time again, this is the one thing that I would hear people aspire for, despite everything that they were going through. I have listened to hundreds of dreams: to be a teacher, a nurse, a musician. To reconnect with children, to spend more time with a grandmother. To volunteer in communities, to help people find homes. To feed others, to listen, to care, to comfort, to serve. There are plenty of valid reasons for people to be angry and bitter as a result of their illness. While that is a part of life, I am struck by how many times I watched people choose the opposite of those things-and instead, explore how to use their experience to make life better for the people around them.

I do not believe that we want to spend our existence in cruelty, living out our days hurting each other. Perhaps there are some people like that, but I can’t speak for them. I only know what I’ve seen, which is human beings trusting their own capacity for goodness, for care, for love, and extending that into the world around them.

In contrast, outside of the hospital, I think we are quick to give up on each other, and are often driven by mistrust. Whether that serves us or not is for us to explore. It strikes me as a temporary story, that we somehow think says something essential about who we are. Personally, I don’t agree with that narrative. The evidence to the contrary has been overwhelming. In each of us is the possibility for a deep sense of compassion and care for others-it is only a question of whether we nurture that, or not.

Spirituality is deeply human. We underestimate the best of who we are.

I know myself through who, and what, I am connected to. Everything is relationship, and the quality of those relationships define the kind of lives we are able to live. If we were to summarize it, that’s all spirituality is. Where we find those relationships-whether they live in the house of religion, or music, or friendship, or in the land, is a journey that’s up to us. When we discover those connections that deeply matter, which ask us to give ourselves to something more, we begin to live in a way that ultimately changes the scope of our lives.

Change is not easy, but it’s always important. In relationship we find the things that will help us when change doesn’t feel comfortable: kindness, compassion, patience, gratitude, generosity. I cannot emphasize enough how much these qualities matter. I have watched them save lives, offering a way through moments in which such grace seemed impossible. They are more than just positive states. They are chords in the music of divinity, a sound that can be heard in all things. If we are willing to listen closely, we may be able to hear life’s most important messages.

Here is some of what I have heard in my own listening: we are all doing our best to figure it out. We often hurt each other because we don’t know what we’re doing. We are afraid to admit that, and are worried that we will be rejected by the world if we do. We are all deserving of love and belonging, and the fear of isolation can make the heart hard and bitter. There is no deeper relief than being seen, heard, and held. Relationships built on that are worth everything. Because we are all capable of love, each of us has something important and valuable to offer-something that is needed, something that will help, something that exists in light. Love is more than an experience, it is an action, something we can do every day, all of the time. The world is waiting for us to act in love, to share, to shrug off our insecurities and join in the co-creation of belonging.

There are a lot of problems. Trying to fix everything is its own kind of trouble.

In the style of one of my mentors, I think of myself as a “recovering perfectionist”. I aspire for excellence, I like feeling competent, I want to do things as well as they can be done. You can imagine what happens when those attitudes come up against experiences in which you are helpless and unable to change what is happening.

There is so much that happens in the hospital that I can’t fix. People who don’t deserve to die, pass away. Children get cancer. What was supposed to be one surgery becomes several. Liver transplants fail. Patients fall through the cracks of systems that aren’t set up to support them. It can be hard to watch the pain, anger, and loneliness that emerges from those experiences, and it’s a parallel process. Often I would feel similar things, frustrated and sad that I couldn’t make things better for people. If I wasn’t careful, I would exhaust myself trying to shift something that wasn’t mine to move.

Life is often unfair, and learning to live with heartbreak is a constant test. I am still grieving patients who deserved better, or longer time, or more love in their lives. I’m troubled by a healthcare system that often sees a human being as a pile of money to be earned, rather than a life to be nurtured. At the bedside, my heart has been broken more times than I can count, in ways small and large.

Over time, I’ve come to think of this heartbreak as a gift, a balm for my perfectionism. Heartbreak reminds us that we care, that we’re willing to step beyond selfishness. We’ve allowed another life into the inner chamber of own hearts, which is a vulnerable and courageous act. Perhaps that action, however small it may seem, is a glimpse of something important. We make the world an incredibly hard place to live in, and our attitudes of indifference and scorn towards life can feel like a constant defeat. Heartbreak tells us that, while we can’t fix everything, we still care enough to show up and keep searching for a way forward. That it’s worth it to keep going, because the very act of loving something into its end is part of what allows life to go on.

I think it’s better to have your heart broken a thousand times, than to live pretending that you don’t care at all.

The simplicity of what we can offer is sacred, and should never be underrated.

Some of the most significant things I’ve been able to offer my patients have been ordinary. Spiritual care is often 95% listening, and only 5% talking. I like to think that people have forgotten what I’ve said to them, that my words and sentences were as fleeting as the breeze.

What I found to be particularly meaningful beyond what I had to say was a held hand. A cup of ice chips. Holding space for someone to cry. A river rock to hold onto, a favorite poem printed for the wall, a “thank you for letting me come visit today.” There’s something there that is capable of curing something, even in an incurable situation.

I once spent a couple of months visiting a man who was dying of metastatic cancer. His family lived far, and he did not have anyone else who could come see him. In the beginning, we talked about his children, his prayer group, the members of his care team that he enjoyed visiting with. As his cancer spread, he became less able to speak and share in conversation, and his mental status worsened. He became increasingly confused and agitated, unsure of where he was or who he was talking to. I continued to visit regardless, even if it was just a few minutes of sitting quietly next to his bed.

Three days before he died, I happened to be on the floor shortly after a rapid response had been called into his room (this is a special kind of alert to address a possible life-threatening medical emergency). Coming in behind the team, I said hello like I always did, and crouched down next to him. As I did so, his hand shot out and grabbed my own. This was surprising-at this stage, he did not usually respond to people around him, much less recognize them. We sat there, hand in hand, while the medical team shifted around us and attended to the machines and his body.

Finally, eyes closed, he wheezed out a single word. “Please.” He squeezed my hand harder.

I squeezed it back. “I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere.”

I’ll never forget what it felt like to hold his hand, to say nothing and simply sit with him in the sunset of his life. There is so much we can do for each other, and the world, that I think we sometimes neglect as useless or insubstantial. Because we don’t value its potential, it goes unused, and we never take the time to see what it can do. Taking the simplicity of what we can do seriously is a deep responsibility.

Vulnerability is freedom.

No one bothers the chaplain. You have a kind of immunity that is admittedly a little pleasant and also disorienting. You are constantly wearing the projections that people place on you-whether you are appreciated, or disliked, or completely ignored. I’ve been mistaken for a priest, a doctor, a family member, and even a trespasser in the hospital.

There’s not a lot you can do about peoples’ perceptions of you. You can only be yourself, which is always a vulnerable experience. As I wrote earlier, there is often little opportunity in this work to pretend to be someone else. Your masks are often a disservice to others, who are seeking human connection and someone who will listen. As we all know in our own ways, pretending to be someone else is exhausting, a limiting and rarely enjoyable way to live your life.

It is never fully comfortable to knock on the door of a stranger and ask if they would like to talk. I’ve always felt some kind of nerves before every patient visit, and I’m not sure that will get any easier. You’re worried, and naturally so, about what they’ll think of you, what will happen, or if your visit will disturb them in some way.

I’m glad to say that across all of my visits, I’ve been kicked out upon entry only once. And even that was okay-a reminder that we do not need to be liked or approved by everyone to be ourselves.

The vulnerability involved in being human is always worth it. It’s not casual, and often a difficult choice that rarely changes. But it’s always worth it. We benefit from honesty, and seeing honesty in one another. Some of my most memorable conversations were with patients who declared that they weren’t spiritual, or religious, or who had no idea who I was or why I was there. That’s the thing-vulnerability doesn’t have an agenda. It’s just life expressing itself, being who we are, as we are. When we can do that in the world, we start to find connections beyond what is familiar or similar to us. Sometimes we’ll get kicked out, sometimes we’ll be mistaken for someone that we’re not. However, our vulnerability is what allows us to be seen, and to find our sight in each other.

Pretending is restrictive, a cage of our own making. Vulnerability is open space, a freedom of expression that invites us to love who we are-and to love what we find in the world around us.

And God?

Probably not for me to comment on. The Buddhist part of me has no cues to take-the Buddha was silent about God, which is convenient for him and baffling for the rest of us. For me, his silence strikes me as neither an admission nor a negation. Coming from a tradition that does not pray or call upon divinity in the manner of theistic religions, I think the silence has helped me become more curious about those are moved by their faith in God and what that means to them.

In my care, I have prayed more than I imagined I would in my lifetime. I have seen the angry God, the merciful God, the completely peaceful and the intensely wrathful. I have met the God who deals out only death and judgment, and the God who sacrifices everything. I have seen prayers answered immediately, others whose time has not yet come, and some that never came.

The conclusion? I’m still not sure, and it’s a question that’s probably best left open. What I can say is this-at the bedside, in moments of honest and genuine prayer, I have at times felt things move in a way that I cannot explain. Nor do I need to-I could sense that doing so would cheapen the experience, like trying to put the ocean into a vase.

What I do know is that there was always something sacred in play between myself and all of the people that I met. What we would like to call it doesn’t seem so important. But it was there, and it dances constantly between us and among all things.

Yogis honor the divinity between each other, Buddhists acknowledge the mutually held seed of enlightenment. Muslims invoke it in greeting and departure, Christians ask for its blessing. However we approach it, there is something more in the world than our individual experience. It is closer than air, more intimate than our heartbeat. It is us, as we seek ourselves and each other. It is sacred, full of our depth and beauty and humanity. It is the blossom which blooms in fire, the sun that rises in darkness.

I think knowing what this sacredness is, is not the journey. Seeking it out, in whatever ways we experience its resonance, may be everything.

In February of this year I wrote about hope, despair, and the possibility of something beyond the two. In recent days my thoughts have returned to this idea, revisiting the question of hope and wondering about its place in my life during such fragile times.

If I’m being honest with myself, my perspective on hope has been changing. Looking within, I haven’t felt particularly hopeful. The more I attend to what I wish would happen in the world, the more disappointed I feel. The exact opposite of what I hope for seems to keep happening. Carrying hope has felt heavy. Each slash of violence, every innocent death, every instance of inhumanity, only seems to increase the weight in my heart.

Yet, I wake up everyday and get to the business of life. The morning brings no hesitance to get up and try again-I don’t feel like staying in bed and I’m not in the mood for despair. Even if the day brings a thousand betrayals, if my phone buzzes with more headlines that will surely ruin my optimism, I feel accepting of that and have the desire to show up anyway.

It’s odd to carry a weight and a lightness at the same time. I think it’s true that I’m lacking a kind of hope that I used to have, and it’s also true that I don’t want to give up on myself or the world around me. Perhaps I never thought it possible to have both, that I could walk through life with both things. The pain of what is happening in our world right now feels like a wound opened daily, and somehow I’m finding chances to attend to it.

Something that certainly helps is the privilege of having a sense of vocation and calling. I’m grateful that I have the opportunity to be in the world in ways that feel satisfying and fulfilling. I’m aware that modern life often asks us to choose between our security and our passion, and it is no small blessing to have access to both.

I also think that the nature of my work has been shifting how I think about hope. I am endlessly in awe to be in the presence of people who find their courage and humanity amidst unimaginable suffering. Whether it is excruciating physical pain, or a life-changing diagnosis, or even confronting death itself, I have watched human beings choose hope more times than I can count. This isn’t always a hope that things will get better, or that their lives will return to a kind of normal-it’s a hope that there’s still a life beyond the familiar and the expected. In peoples’ darkest moments, they still find ways to make choices that reach past what they know in search of something more.

The rational mind of our culture may dismiss that choice as a matter of circumstance. There’s a certain nihilism that might claim that hope is just a way coping with something that can’t be accepted. Humans search for meaning because they cannot confront the possibility that there is none, that the universe is an indifferent vacuum in which we struggle pointlessly. To look for something past conflict and self-preservation is either misguided or naive.

Another truth on my heart these days-I’m tired of that perspective. To me, it feels like a cheap way to excuse harmful behavior, claiming to know something before you’ve even bothered to explore it. It’s like someone who has spent their whole life in the desert, never seeing the ocean, telling you that such a thing couldn’t possibly exist and it would be foolish to look for it. If the desert is all you know, the ocean is a comforting idea but nothing to be seriously considered.

I think at this point in my journey, I’ve seen too many people make extraordinary choices in seemingly hopeless circumstances to entertain that kind of notion anymore. I have watched people find belief, purpose, and endurance in places that should be utterly absent of those qualities. Witnessing that kind of activity on an almost daily basis has moved something in me, causing me to think differently about what it means to continue searching for what makes us whole.

What is getting me out of bed everyday, what keeps fire in my stomach, is perhaps no longer hope by itself, but trust. While they may describe it differently, what I’ve seen happen in the lives of people I serve and in the lives of those who inspire me is a willingness to trust the unknown and embrace that experience completely. What allows them to continue is not a return to the past or the pursuit of an ideal future, but to participate in a more expansive present.

Hope often carries a sense of familiarity, a vision of the future that includes pieces of a reality which we already experience. Because it includes elements of what we see in our present moment, optimism for a more enhanced future is alluring and feels possible. It helps us to keep going, with the anticipation that such a world could be right around the corner.

I’m not sure I’m invested in that story in the same way I used to be. I like that story, and it’s a narrative that’s helped me through some difficult times. It’s urged me to stay grounded in my values, practice what matters to me, and give up the temptation to despair.

In this moment of my life now, I think I need more, because the world has shown me that more can happen. I’m not totally sure that things are going to get better anytime soon. We seem to be in a moment in which the powers of hatred, greed, and cruelty are prepared to fight to the death to maintain their control. Whether it’s embodied in our governments, politicians, or people of influence, there is a willingness to sacrifice the planet and the future for the sake of that power, and we have to take those stakes seriously. For me, I need more than hope to hold that.

When the struggle of that fight feels especially grim, and the weight of the hurt it causes feels unbearable, trust has felt like new ground to stand on. Trust is the instinct that gets me out the door, and back into the world, and through the tumult of our present moment day after day.

What do I trust? I trust that something different can happen if I have the courage to show up. I place my confidence in the persistent willingness of human beings to evolve, to step past the comfort of ignorance and denial. In my work, I watch people strive for each other’s wellbeing with an almost relentless desire-no matter how many times it doesn’t work out. I trust that there’s somewhere to go with that desire, the resolve to keep trying.

I also trust myself, and I trust you. The fact that I’m writing this, and that you’re reading these words, tells me that you and I are both searching for something more than what we already know and can already see. Perhaps we have both made that choice to explore the unknown, to keep looking for what is possible and transformative and true in our hearts. I trust that to live in search of those things is what will guide us, towards one another and through the immense difficulty of this time.

None of this means I am fully absent of hope. Hope always has been, is now, and will continue to be. My hope includes you and what you are capable of being. If I know that other people are trying to find a way, then that’s enough for me to keep searching myself. What becomes of that is likely beyond us, but at least there is a reason to keep going. I trust the thing that caused you to read this, or to read things like it. That energy and curiosity is the seed of creating a better world for ourselves and others.

I titled this Substack “The Raft Project” because I wanted it to reflect the search for what is essential and important on the human journey. Life can often have that vulnerable, yet resilient experience of being on a raft: in which everything we do matters and what we take with us deserves our attention. I think we are overburdened with things that do not matter and do not serve us, and that exposes us to distress and despair. Reflecting on what truly nurtures our wellbeing lightens the weight and gives us what we need for the journey ahead.

For me, trust is one thing that I have on my raft right now-sailing beyond hope and expectation of what might be, in pursuit of what’s next. I don’t know what the future will bring, or whether I will see what I hope for in my lifetime. I am reminded that many lives before our own journeyed in a similar way, and we enjoy things now that our ancestors were not able to see. Whatever happens, I know that I can’t abandon those efforts, or the will of my fellow humans in this moment to carry on. Trust gives me the chance to continue working for what I love, for its own sake and in the hope that it offers something meaningful for an uncertain future.

The inclination for politeness lives in me like my bones do, moving with the same instinct as lifting my hand. I grew up in a part of the US that values being nice above all else-so much so that we’re famous for it. From the youngest age, I was taught to have polished manners, to present myself as even and untroubled, to say things that were bright and unrevealing. To be polite was to be a good family member, a good student, a good person.

I learned that life would often reward you for being nice. I remember my parents beaming with pride after parent-teacher conferences, passing along appreciation for my behavior towards adults in school. I would be rewarded with stickers, candy, and erasers shaped like footballs for knowing when to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’. As I got older, I would focus hard on my compliments and flattery, hoping this would make me a more likable person.

I also learned that being polite included knowing when to be quiet. It’s good to engage with others, but you didn’t want to engage too much. It’s important to mind the boundaries, and avoid making people uncomfortable. Interest and curiosity were two different things: you want to show interest, but not so interested that you feel invasive to someone else. Make sure people feel good-but don’t over-commit. Letting other people talk, not making yourself the center of attention-all of these were a part about what it meant to show politeness.

When you’re polite, you’re never getting in the way. The first action is always to defer to the other, and in doing so you put someone at ease. There is no sense of threat in your being-you shape yourself to them, and in doing so respect the boundaries of their world in a way that’s pleasing. It’s a way of saying, “I’m not going to hurt you, and I want you to be okay as you are.”

This isn’t a bad way to be with people-embodying courtesy and a polite interest in others lends itself well. Through being nice, we are neither a challenge nor a stranger: showing enough of our humanity to harmonize with another’s. In its most comfortable moments, there’s a safety that can mirror a kind of happiness: relaxing into the knowledge that in avoiding harming others, it’s hopeful that harm won’t seek you out.

Any aspect of being human, no matter what it is, always has its particularly function and purpose in our lives. We might say that it has a kind of wisdom, telling us something about the kind of person we can be. The wisdom of politeness taught me about having a basic sense of respect or acknowledgment of the life beyond my own. Kindness guides me to connect with others through recognizing that life, as an offering, always has something of value to show us. This includes other people.

However, it helps to have more than one kind of wisdom. Wisdom of only one type can potentially hold us back. When we only have one way of moving through the world, we have only one response to the vast complexity of being alive. Some situations, but not all, will respond to what we know about showing up.

As I got older, I noticed that politeness wasn’t working for me in every situation. I began to see things I didn’t agree with, behavior that didn’t sit right, ways of treating others that moved against what I felt in my heart. The need to be nice would rear up in my mind, urging me not to rock the boat. Being an inconvenience to others was unacceptable, especially if that included conflict. Conflict represented a lack of harmony, or even an inability to show respect. As conflict naturally grew in my life and became more complex, I realized that I was finding myself at a crossroads.

What do you do when your world tells you to do one thing, but your heart tells you to do another?

In moments of conflict, I noticed how words would jam themselves in my throat, politeness placing a lid over the top of what I wanted to say. I could feel the frustration of holding in parts of myself-the parts that knew something needed to be done or said. The tension would ripple through my body, my heart dropping as I watched my conscience shrink backwards. “It’s not the right time”, I would tell myself. “Well, I would’ve said something, but I didn’t want to get in the way…”. There was always a reason, something quick and soothing to ease the fact that I was itching with discomfort. I could hear the voice of my childhood, my home, my world, reminding me not to upset anyone, even if I was upset.

Crossroads continued to emerge. Politeness began to feel stickier, less of a relationship and more of a role, a performance. Much of my time with others felt like maintenance, rather than connection. I didn’t know how to manage conflict, torn between the urge to do something different and an instinct to keep things the same. In moments where I was able to muster the courage to say how I truly felt, the fear and embarrassment ran hot. The faces of discomfort in other people felt like a censure, a quiet plea to “please, stop talking.”

Eventually, we all reach a point in which we have no choice but to use our voice. Something must be said, because to say nothing can be its own kind of harm. It’s also possible that being polite and kind can become harmful, limiting what we can do through our mannered caution.

In some moments, particularly those that need our authentic voice and action, these traits need to become bigger, more impactful than something pleasant or agreeable. When they expand, they take on new life, becoming an act of creation that urges something else into existence. What emerges is the quality of compassion.

Compassion, as I understand it, may include things like kindness, but acts beyond the boundaries that we impose on our behavior to avoid conflict and the discomfort of change. At the crossroads, it’s the choice to go a different way when everyone else would normally go another.

Compassion is kindness on fire: a force of energy and engagement that is fearless in nature. Compassion takes our kindness and elevates it beyond a sense of limitation, doubt, or self-consciousness. All of our positive qualities-patience, understanding, listening, and love, become alive and bravely step into the world around us.

We could say that there’s a certain willingness in compassion that politeness or kindness can sometimes hesitate to lean into. When we feel hurt by someone else, we might not want to say something. Our kindness knows that the other person is having a hard time (so why bother them?). Our politeness doesn’t want to have a tough conversation (we don’t want to hurt their feelings, right?). Compassion knows both of these things, and yet expresses our hurt because it is genuine. Compassion is a practice of honesty that is willing to be uncomfortable in search of connection.

While it involves conflict and hard conversations, sharing your hurt with another is an act of kindness becoming compassionate activity. You respect your relationship enough to say something-you want it to grow, not stay the same. To stay quiet can be harmful towards yourself, and the other person. You suffer in silence, and the other person suffers because they don’t know they’ve caused you harm. To share is to show respect, love, and care in a deeper way.

When I’m in the hospital as a chaplain, and someone is sharing their grief and anguish with me, I am not there with them out of kindness alone. Am I offering kindness? Absolutely. Does it have a role in what I say and do? Of course! But limiting myself to that wisdom by itself doesn’t always cut it. There are moments where I need to show up from a more expansive place, a place that can meet the rawness of experience while also staying grounded within myself. Compassion is what allows my full self to emerge, drawing from the richness of relationship. Kindness acknowledges the grief-compassion grieves along with it.

In the community of human belonging, we know, deep down, that we cannot separate ourselves from each other. In the face of profound injustice and cruel violations of human life, we sense that pain, we know it’s there. That pain is not asking for us to be polite about it. We cannot murmur quiet words of condolence and hope it goes away. If we are to make belonging a real experience, rather than limit it to a beautiful idea, then we might need more than just our capacity for kindness. We must find ways to set our kindness alight: not to destroy it, but to increase its potency. We can allow our concern and sympathy to become the burning flame of compassion.

I think each of us has our own knowledge about this. We all know when we shy away from certain things, when we struggle to speak up or show up. We all have our reasons for avoiding discomfort, for passing up the road less traveled. This is not cause for shame or self-blame: it’s part of being human. The world, particularly this present moment, is an incredibly hard place to live in. You may have also heard of the term “compassion fatigue”: it takes energy to care, and we all have our limits. It’s important to know what we’re capable of, and to seek that ability without over-exerting ourselves.

Compassion doesn’t make us super-human: but maybe it activates more of our humanity at a time in which it is sorely needed. I see compassion not as a practice of doing more/being more/changing more, rather a way of living in the world that is more open, more available to life’s complexity. Discomfort is a necessary tension of being alive, and compassion nurtures the passionate energy that we need to move with it.

Acts of kindness are still immensely important in staying in touch with our humanity. They can certainly get us part of the way-but perhaps compassion can take us even further.

If we seek to grow in authenticity, if life’s journey is a path of becoming more of ourselves, then compassion is an important part of that growth. Compassion can see more than one thing, and still do what is right. It can appreciate complexity and nuance without getting stuck. It is radical honesty, that doesn’t try to paper over what is hard and heartbreaking. As we find our courage and learn to express ourselves, compassion nurtures the freedom to be a part of genuine transformation, coming alive and existing in our full voice.

I invite you to spend some time with the following questions. Spend a few moments with each: close your eyes, sense into your body, and see where the words take you.

Who are you?

What kind of world do you live in?

Who would you like to share your life with?

What worries you?

What parts of you feel celebrated?

Which parts feel hidden?

What shapes the way you move in life?

What comforts you when you’re scared?

Who or what do you feel grateful for?

What do you wish you could say?

These questions (a non-exhaustive list) represent our wholeness, and the journey towards it. Whatever is felt in response calls us towards an experience that does not need to be ‘discovered’, rather appreciated with increasing interest. As pieces of our whole, they include the reality of who we are right now in the present moment. They are spacious enough to include our brilliance and awkwardness, our confidence and our curiosities. We do not need to be “something else” to be whole.

Much of modern life imposes a perpetual sense of feeling incomplete, and demands that we live out our days toiling towards things that neither reflect nor satisfy us. We are encouraged to consume life as quickly as it comes to us, and attempts to live it instead are scorned for their lack of production or improvement. There is the suggestion that if only we knew certain things, or did certain things correctly, that we might discover a kind of happiness that will lift us above all discomfort and keep us safe from harm.

Wholeness is much more honest than this way of life, something deeper and more respectful with the truths of being human. It is more compassionate with our learning, affirming of our gifts, forgiving with our mistakes. Even the difficult, messy things are woven into a fabric of nurture and care.

If wholeness were a temple, it wouldn’t just be a place to meditate on the things we love. There would be an altar for our unhappiness. There would candles to light in spaces for our grief, our suffering, our despair. We could keep quiet vigils for feeling insecure, confused, or anxious. Wholeness welcomes all, includes all, invites every part of us into knowing and appreciation.

In other words, wholeness is a sacred experience, living a sacred life. It is sacred because everything about us, and everything in our world, matters. This approach is not the same as self-importance, or an exclusive sort of being that makes us better than others. It is an active embrace of all things, because we are a part of everything within and around us.

If we have never considered this, this may feel difficult to feel into. We should give ourselves grace-life today keeps our attention and feelings divided, and each part is compelled to compete with the parts of others. We are not encouraged to be ourselves, and our value is often a reflection of our ability to pretend. We are welcomed only if we conform, or abandon, or reject pieces of who we are. Our survival depends on our capacity to ignore our existence, to behave as if things do not matter to us.

There have been times in my life where I felt this intensely, in which I tried to force out parts of me that I thought were weak, unreliable, or unappealing. I, like many of us, simply wanted to be included, valued, in relationship with something else. I thought I had to change who I was in order to be a part of the world. I felt that adopting indifference, pretending that I was above my feelings about myself or the world, would offer me safety.

It says a lot about our state of being today, when we feel that from the very beginning we have to do something different in order to exist. As if somehow, we are not enough from the moment we wake up. That to live should require a constant process of fitting in, denying who we are so that we can eat empty affirmations and hold our truths hostage.

What a lonely experience. What an isolating way to live. I have known what loneliness feels like, and maybe you have to. I think we can agree that we wouldn’t wish that on anyone.

In response to this, wholeness accepts us before our first step. It welcomes whomever we are and whatever it is that lives within our experience. It is not something we have to earn. It is inclusive of everything we are and will be. As we grow and learn more about what matters to us, wholeness grows with us. Rather than living in a constant state of rejection and pretension, we get to become more of ourselves.

I cannot think of another way to describe this way of living other than sacred. This word, while often housed in religion, is not exclusive to it. It’s a word which simply suggests that all of life, every moment, each encounter, is profound in its unique expression. Life itself is a valuable offering, a relationship with being that does not require anything except our attendance. It is available always, and big enough to include each part of us.

We don’t talk about the sacred much these days. If anything, the dominant theme is that it’s embarrassing to care, foolish to have reverence, stupid to do anything except for your own self-interest. The journey towards what matters to us is discarded for material things, fleeting experiences, moments of pleasure that leave us vacant and hungry. To regard life as ‘sacred’ is to believe in fairytales, myth, or a misguided optimism that only gets you hurt.

I suppose that we can go on and continue to live this way, if we like. But let’s pause for a moment and ask ourselves: how is that going? Do these values make us happy? Does it feel good to abandon our vulnerabilities, pretend to be someone that we’re not, to live out our days ignoring what our hearts tell us?

Perhaps your answer is yes. Perhaps your answer is “No, but I don’t have another choice”, or “I don’t have the time to think about these things”. Personally, I have lived out all of these responses at one time or another.

At a certain point with each experience, I realized that all of these behaviors and patterns of living shared a common result. I was never myself. I never knew who I was, or what I cared about, or what actually mattered to me. I was chasing the tail of my own pleasure, depriving myself of any chance to be authentic. My relationships, my interests, and my sense of worth all felt artificial, only meaningful if other people gave me their approval.

When nothing is sacred, nothing matters. And when nothing matters, there is no pulse, no movement, no sense of real connection with anything within or around us. It’s like walking around with noise-cancelling headphones without any music playing, or touching everything with thick winter gloves. We sense life, but cannot truly contact it, trapped by our own self-imprisonment. It’s a muted abyss, hidden behind a false experience of freedom.

When things are sacred, things begin to matter. And when life matters, there is pulse, movement, contact with everything around us. Life is relationship, every touch an encounter that can nourish us. We sense life in everything and are drawn towards it, liberated by our willingness to include. Life becomes as open and receptive as the sky.

What is it like to touch this sacredness, which guides us towards being whole? Here are some ways I’ve encountered this lately. Maybe they resonate with experiences you’ve had. They are not always lofty or intense, and can be as simple as this:

• The feeling of warm water running over my hands as I wash them.

• The sound of sparrow wings in the desert, the land so quiet that you can hear their tiny flutterings hum and sing.

• Seeing a smile in someone’s eyes, not just their mouth.

• The chance to be vulnerable in a group of people. The way my palms began to sweat, and my heartbeat increased. The way it felt to be heard.

• Watching the half-moon at dawn, slightly veiled by the thin pink clouds.

• Reading something that caused me to pause. Curiosity murmuring between my lips, I set the book down and closed my eyes.

• A child asking why adults won’t talk to each other when they’re fighting. Dad’s response didn’t clarify anything, in part because I think he knew a good answer would be hard to come by.

• Embracing someone who had just shared a loss with me. The feeling of what is said in that embrace, without needing to say anything else.

• The wind in my ears. The sun in my face. The blue sky stretching over my body.

What do we see in these vignettes? My hope is that we witness that, at its core, wholeness is an invitation to look and to listen. It is paying attention to what happens in our lives, as if each moment were a guest coming to sit down in our home.

In these examples, life isn’t perfect. Difficult emotions are experienced. There are more questions than answers. The moments themselves are fleeting, moments that I won’t experience again in the same way. They don’t ‘solve’ or ‘accomplish’ anything in the traditional sense. My problems haven’t gone away, there is still work to be done.

Nevertheless, these moments are sacred.

I recall these things because they matter to me. Ultimately, I cannot exactly say why or how. The feelings behind such experiences are beyond words, moving in a space deep within my being and nurturing how I move through life.

The same is true for everyone. What is sacred to each of us does not require justification. We do not need to explain or prove to other people why it matters. Neither do we need to compare it to other life experiences. Wholeness simply is: left for us to tend, in whatever ways hold value for us.

To see with sacred eyes is an invitation to live in a state of acknowledgement, to honor and take seriously the things which we love and care for. Life becomes more than a transaction, or a future reward that we spend all of our energy working for. Each step places us on a journey to be savored. Every moment becomes one worth experiencing (yes, even the hard ones). Every sensation, from love to suffering, is a musical note in a symphony of living.

Because wholeness includes the things that are hard, we have more space to do the difficult work of grieving, healing, and reparation. There’s enough room for beauty and sorrow to join together. Joy can hold hands with sadness. We do not always have to be in a state of sacrificing one thing for the next. Being alive can be hard: but attempting to hold off the difficulty might be harder. In the moment, this reminds me of something J.R.R. Tolkien once wrote. In paraphrase:

“One who flies from their fear may find that they have only taken a short cut to meet it.”

Wholeness is the path of making the sum of our reality sacred: so that we may have the space, the energy, and the courage to discover ourselves within it. It is a transformative relationship to life which opens the heart, expands the mind, and cultivates a path of patient friendship with whatever comes our way. There are no short-cuts: we can take our time, and just like a friend, we hold our lives with respect.

As we befriend ourselves and our life as a whole, we discover something remarkable, as obvious as it may sound. We find that life calls us to be nothing except ourselves. Who and what we are matters, and therefore our very being is sacred.

If you go back to the beginning of this post, try adding the phrase “That is sacred.” or “They are sacred.”, at the end of each question. If this word feels hard for you, try out “That matters”, or “They matter”.

Read them again. What do you notice? Does it change how you think about the questions?

It does for me. I notice that I enter a more reflective space, in which I can recall particular memories and specific people. I notice appreciation growing in my heart, even for the hard things. There’s a sense of resolve to continue towards the things which matter to me. It’s harder to feel ambivalent or dismissive about life. Whatever my reflections evoke in me, I want to go towards them.

May we all find the courage to go towards what is sacred to us. May we all have the opportunity to touch it. May we shed the hardness of indifference, the isolation of pretending, and invite every part of ourselves into a sacred wholeness of being.

“Things are very urgent. We need to slow down.”

These are words that come from a colleague of mine, an Indigenous woman elder. Even though they were spoken a few years ago, they’ve been haunting me ever since.

I use the word “haunting” lightly, of course. But I’ve noticed that no matter what I’m doing, her words keep rattling around my headspace. On the train, doing the dishes, settling down for the night-my mind continues to wrestle with them, with plenty of food for thought and bewilderment.

I don’t think I understand what they mean, and this writing isn’t an attempt to extract that meaning. I just know that I love them, their familiarity and their mystery. I’ve been enjoying their elusive quality, the way they feel like they speak a truth about my life without fully revealing themselves. Whenever you come across words that affect you like that, I think they’re worth pursuing and seeing what they can teach you.

In my own pursuit, I’ve been reflecting on the fact that nothing about my life in the last five years (or so) has been slow. Everything has felt urgent. Most of the time I feel like I’m operating at maximum speed and capacity, stretching all of my resources to meet ever-growing needs. The more I get to do, the more I get to see, which means there’s always more to do. I tend to be led by the question, “If you believe you can do it, why not see if you can?”, and that guides a lot of how I show up in life.

It’s a complicated relationship: moving through life that way makes me feel alive, and I think it allows me to explore the best of myself. I feel deeply involved with my own existence, working with the essence of myself for the sake of something bigger. It also has its limits: I’m only one person, and constantly pushing at the edges of what you are in the present can be exhausting. I don’t think I’m trying to accomplish or prove anything, per se-I just want to see more of myself as I grow. I’ve always had the sense that self-discovery is infinite, and action is a key part of what allows that exploration to happen.

Especially as someone who works in healthcare and the caregiving profession, I see these values and instincts show up all of the time. When you’re surrounded by people who are highly trained, working ridiculous hours, working to serve needs that will never go away no matter how hard or how long you exert yourself-it’s easy to feed off that energy. There’s something exhilarating and dangerous about the commitment. It’s deeply motivating and ultimately futile, because the work will always be there. At the same time, you get to feel like you’re a part of something significant, working alongside other humans who really care about what they do.

There’s a lot of speed in that quality of work, but not much rhythm. And there’s a big difference between speed and rhythm, isn’t there? I think what I find striking about my colleague’s words is that they suggest rhythm, flow, a way of moving through life that disables the habit of doing everything “at speed”. The idea of rhythm wakes me up to a different way of experiencing life, in which I can do the same things but with a transformed relationship to activity.

I think I get to see some of this within my particular role within healthcare. One of the things that I find interesting about my work as a spiritual care provider is that I’m the one person on a care team that isn’t trying to keep someone alive. Everyone else is deeply involved in prolonging, extending, or maintaining someone’s lifespan as much as possible. That’s not my job, and because of that I’m involved in that person’s life in a much different way. What I’m doing, and how I’m doing it, looks a lot different than what drives the often frenetic pace of a hospital.

While of course I want my patients to live long and happy lives, I suppose illness and death aren’t a “problem” for me in a way that it is for the medical system. In my work, I’m engaging those experiences without trying to solve anything, or fix someone’s body. Instead, I’m participating in a person’s life rhythm: stepping into the movement of their world and being present to what’s already happening. There’s plenty of work that can be done, but it’s happening at a much different speed.

I’ve been wondering about how I can relate to my own life in a similar way. When I’m not at my best, I can feel like life is a laundry list of pressing problems that need solving, vital tasks which need completion. Sometimes, rest only feels reasonable when all of those things can get done. I notice urges to keep seeing patients, to continue meeting requests, to keep showing up, instead of pausing or having more transition.

On top of that, there are so many things going on in the world that I feel deserve or demand my attention. I feel a sense of responsibility as a member of a community and society that encourages personal obligations. It feels like there’s a lot of things that need to happen in the world right now, and quickly.

Things in my life feel very urgent. I need to slow down.

Recently I had to take a medical leave from work because of a sports-related injury. I wasn’t able to walk for a time, and all of my work depends on my mobility. At face-value, you might think this was a blessing in disguise: some time off from work, some extra days to rest, an unexpected but welcome interlude to the daily hustle.

I was shocked at how hard it was for me. I really tried to lean into it-sleeping in, leaving more time for my meditation practice, putting my phone away and allowing the days to ease and wander. I was surprised at how hard it was to relax, how often my mind went to the urge to do something. I felt adrift in an ocean of time, feeling guilty for having the chance to float. I even began to berate myself internally for getting injured in the first place, feeling like I was abandoning the work and motivations I find so much value in.

It made me sad to feel these things, because I knew these were learned behaviors. It caused me to reflect on my childhood, before I knew what urgency felt like. I remember reading all day without a single thought about what time it was. Playing outside in the park with my friends from morning until sunset. Spending hours in museums learning about dinosaurs, or earthquakes, or Egypt, for no reason other than satisfying my own curiosity. I’m grateful to have had many years of life without any sense of urgency at all-living life for life’s sake, the moment in front of me the most important moment I’ve ever lived. In retrospect, there’s something about that experience that feels almost sacred now, a holiness of presence that feels increasingly rare and hard to come by.

I don’t think this sacredness is totally lost to me, but it could use a bit of revival. The riddle of my colleague’s words feels like a portal into that experience, calling me to consider how I can show up to what matters to me without compromising how I nourish myself. If I’m taking the time to sit down and be present with my patients, how I can do the same for myself? Can I hold the hand of my life in the way I practice holding the hands of others?

I recently heard my vocation described as “doing a lot, with very little, with great skill”. I love that definition, and I think it can be applied to how our modern lives can be lived with greater authenticity, rhythm, and purpose. We are all called to be and do different things-how can we respond to that from a place that sustains us? How can we encourage activity in a way that honors the cycles, seasons, and patterns of being human?

After all, it’s inhuman to expect ourselves to do everything, or be every kind of person. Things are urgent right now, but perhaps responding with that same energy is getting in our way somehow. Maybe the most urgent thing that’s needed is to reflect on what that means for us, and move closer towards living life from a place of presence, intention, and center.

In the spirit of reminding myself that this is all possible despite the grind of modernity, here are some ways I’ve been trying to live this out:

Some Things I Recently Did or Saw While Slowing Down

• People-watching while eating passionfruit croissants and grape and olive focaccia with my beloved. I remembered that I much prefer to watch the clouds scroll through the sky than to scroll on my phone.

• Finishing The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkein. A behemoth of a book that’s taken me a year to finish, and so worth it.

• Debating the most ideal restaurant experience with friends old and new while waiting for Taiwanese breakfast sandwiches (and more pastries, of course).

• A skyline sunset from my bedroom window, from start to finish.

• Ran, an incredible cinematic adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear by Japanese director Akira Kurosawa.

• Many games of chess that sometimes took weeks to finish. My hot take is that chess wasn’t meant to be played quickly, and I’ve never been a fan of the bullet/speed chess variety.

• Reducing my screen time on my phone to 2.5 hours per day. Trying to look up and say hello to the world more often!

• The creation of this Substack, which is a repurpose of a website I was previously running and feeling stressed out about. I’ve been grateful for the way this space has offered a restful reset to how I engage writing, and consume social media in general.

Thanks for reading!

How can we be whole when the world feels irreparably broken?

Especially when it feels like everything is falling apart, the desire for things to be different can be overwhelming. There is a deep ache for life to not be the way it is, a yearning for an existence that would allow us to breathe instead of suffocate. It is exhausting to live in what can feel like a cascade of dysfunction and decline.

If there is something about this present moment that feels disquieting or alarming, then that’s cause for at least a moment of reassurance. It means we’re paying attention, allowing ourselves to feel into the moment itself and not turn away from it. If we sense dissonance, we’re acknowledging that something isn’t in alignment. Our hearts and minds are seeking something that isn’t being met right now.

Whether the moment we’re in is right or wrong is perhaps another discussion. But the persistent discomfort of now: the worry, the concern, the fear and stickiness of our circumstances; that’s a very important thing to look at. It’s a painful thing to encounter, but there’s an inner wisdom to that sensation which can tell us something about what might come next.

These feelings can be very hard to lean into without the sense that you’re falling apart along with the world. The jump from worry to panic isn’t that much of a leap. The opportunity to invite cynicism, despair, and hopelessness into our hearts is incredibly tempting. When everyone else appears to be jumping on the Doom train, there’s at least a chance to be comforted by fellow travelers.

From my vantage point at least, that seems to be the temperature in the room at present. There is so much to be troubled about, problems and regressions and disasters beyond count. Joining in the conversation about how “over” things are feels very relatable and reassuring. In that spin room, we get to be reminded that we’re still human beings, who care about things alongside other people. Our sense of normal is breaking down, and it’s good to know that others feel similarly about that breakage. We can grieve, commiserate, and show concern together.

I think that’s the key word, together. What I believe we’re finding in this particular moment is a kind of collective awakening of sorts, an intense but noticeable inhalation of awareness. It’s an experience of people realizing that yes, the emperor is in fact not wearing any clothes, and why are we pretending otherwise? We are seeking a communal expression of truth, a chance to see one another in the feeling of “What is happening right now is not okay.”

What I also wonder about is how long we can stay in that moment of collective overwhelm. Don’t get me wrong: it’s very important, especially if we find ourselves trying to normalize or sidestep events that clearly call out to our conscience. We need to find ways to accept the hurt that we feel, to pass the tests of the eyes, ears, and heart. But if we can do that, how long should we stay there?

Perhaps another way of asking this question is: how well does your distress serve you in this moment? It’s a question only you can answer, an invitation to check-in. In fact, I’d invite you to stop here and pause if you’re able, exploring that question for yourself.

If there is no hope for life, or community, or the world, then there’s nothing left for you to say, or me to write, or for anyone to do. If it’s well and truly over, then so is this conversation. Is that where we are? I don’t think we believe so, at least not completely. It seems like we still have quite a bit to say about the kind of world we’d like to live in.

If there is something yet to be said, then that means there is still something within us that matters. We still have beliefs about the world that live inside of us, beliefs that can still see a bit farther than despair. We’re nurturing something in the depths of our being, no matter how faintly or quietly.

Distress, overwhelm, and all of their close friends eventually become paralysis if they overstay their welcome. It becomes impossible to do or say anything beyond giving up or in. We get stuck, and become accomplices to the way things are. We lose our agency, our sensitivity, our awareness of our own beliefs. We allow others, particularly those that are decidedly not making the world a better place to live in, to do all the talking. Their words and ideas become our consciousness. The pain which they nurture within themselves becomes our pain. We lose touch with ourselves, and with it all of the courage and possibilities which we belong to.

To confront and listen to our distress rarely feels good, but it has a purpose. These feelings are trying to wake us up, to shake us from a daydream of apathy and paralysis. They exist to help us open the door to that ‘something’ which lives inside us, trying to help it get out. We recognize that there’s a certain quality of life that we must bring into being. Distress is an urgent, but encouraged kind of asking: inviting us to live out the reality that we believe in, to allow what exists in our hearts to be our voice.

The cynicism and meanness of our time thrives on us being stuck, revels in our separation, and benefits from the ways in which we silence ourselves. Encouraging our fear and exciting our distraction serves it well-we lose track of who, and how, we want to be.

If we disagree with the way our world is moving, what would we like to say instead? How do we allow the voice which speaks for what we love and care for; our voice, become our first language?

Cultivating this voice for ourselves, and seeking out where we hear echoes of it among others, is what I believe our distress is asking us to do. If we find ourselves in the desert, then we must dig for water. There is a time to reckon with and mourn being in the sand-and there is a time to dig.

We may exist in different places with this: still coming to terms with where we are, grieving that place, or wondering what might come next. We should not rush, and take time to attend to what we need. I would suggest that rushing has got us to where we are now-more of it may not serve us well.

Wherever we may find ourselves in this moment, to look inside and pay attention to what’s moving is our responsibility. The urge to stay hidden from what happens in the world, or to isolate ourselves from what troubles us will continue to be attractive. We may feel tired, or overwhelmed, or incapable of facing these challenges.

I feel this too at times, but I know that to give into these feelings is to live a life that includes very little of me. That’s a life in which I allow smaller, harsher voices to decide things for me, which for myself I cannot allow. I want to seek something broader, wider, more embracing of things. Wholeness, after all, is an experience that includes all of us, even in troubling times.

Whether we need time to come to terms with this this moment, or clarity to know what to do about it-I encourage all of us not to reject the challenge of those questions. They are human questions, good questions, questions that show that we’re not avoiding life. It’s too easy to close your ears and pretend you can’t hear. To continue listening to yourself, to the world, and being honest about what you hear: that’s an act that can inspire real change.

-Thich Nhat Hanh

On Mondays, I meet with people who have cancer.

Each Monday is different, which is also true of the people I encounter. The type of cancer they have, how long they’d had it, their ways of coping and feeling. I never know what I’m going to say. What do you say to someone in this situation, especially when you’re meeting them for the first time? What words can possibly fill that space? Making my way up the elevator, weaving through the halls towards the treatment center, I always feel a bit exposed, completely on the spot.

I suppose I’m not afraid of saying something wrong, or fearful of the conversation in general. It’s not an urge to say something that special, that can solve problems. It’s just the feeling of not knowing what to say at all. There’s no pressure, and there isn’t security, either. As I knock and poke my head around the curtain, I sometimes have a sense of there being an ocean between my breath and the first words to leave my mouth.

The other week, I met a young woman, not much older than I. It was her first round of chemotherapy, after being diagnosed a few weeks earlier. Day 1. She was by herself, sitting silently at the edge of the doorway. As I stepped in, my heart was in my throat. I had never met someone this early in their treatment before, and couldn’t imagine the feelings involved.

What happens when we don’t know what to do? What emerges when we cannot explain what we are witnessing?

These are the questions that were in my mind, and in hers as well. She told me about her life, how she had always tried to do right by others. She has ambitions and a sense of path, to live well and offer her talents to the world around her. The picture that she painted shimmered with light, with aspiration, and hope.

And then, a moment of pause. A stillness. Her lips trembled, her voice wavering. “I just…I just don’t know why”, she said. “I don’t understand why this is happening to me.”

Searching within myself, I found only space. No words came to me, no ideas, no impulse of knowing what to do. I realized that I didn’t know either, and my heart ached with that not-knowing. This woman’s question of ‘why’ expressed something that went beyond the both of us, or anything that we could do about it. Sitting with this for a moment, I decided that’s what I needed to say.

“I don’t understand either”, I said. “I don’t know, and here we are.”

What happens when we don’t know what to do? What emerges when we cannot explain what we are witnessing?

Life, in its turmoil and confusion, can seem desperate for answers. When there are many things that can confuse, challenge, and hurt us, there has to be a reason, a purpose for all of it. We want to know how, or why, or to what end bad things exist. Falling through life, an answer can feel like steady ground, something to stand on.

Often in my work, people come looking to me for answers: why they are ill, and why now, and for what reasons. Some of these reasons are personal: it’s their fault, they didn’t pay attention, they didn’t care when it was important to. Other reasons blame people, blame nature, the universe. The unfairness and grief of losing an expected life is often a painful journey.

I never have answers, at least not the ones people are looking for. There are many things that happen which I can’t explain, and many more that don’t. The temptation to reach for answers, however far-fetched and untrue, can be overwhelming.

Especially inviting is to offer something which I never say: “It’s going to be okay.” I don’t say this because it’s not the truth which lives in my heart. That truth doesn’t know whether it will be okay or not. To speak in either direction would be false, and a disservice to the person whom I’m working with. I’m not there to spin false optimism or empty platitudes: I’m there with them to meet reality, hand in hand.

What happens when we don’t know what to do? Quite a bit, if we’re willing. I don’t think you need to know what to do, to do something. Movement is still possible, but how we move becomes much different. How we listen to what can happen requires a different way of paying attention.

Not-knowing can be a teacher and a source of real wisdom. This is different from ignorance, which is asleep to reality and unaware of what’s happening. Not-knowing is a relationship with life in its natural expression, an embrace of mystery. It loosens the need to be right and assured all of the time, leaning into the possibility of a broadened perspective.

When I’m working with people with cancer, my experience of not-knowing allows something essential to happen: honesty. If honesty represents a healthy relationship with life, then not-knowing allows me to lean into the truth of my experience. I can share with people from a place of genuine inquiry, using my lack of answers to seek better questions.

If I pretended to have answers, I wouldn’t listen for questions in the first place. When honesty is available, I can empathize and connect to people from the ground of their reality. That ground is present to what’s in the room: people are often scared, and worried about what’s going to happen, grieving things seen and unseen. There’s no need to pretend otherwise, and that lack of pretending can be deeply liberating. The truth will set you free, as it were.

This freedom can walk closely with mourning. Especially when things are hard, having permission to be honest about what pains us and our lack of answers is both generative and saddening. At the heart of it is the yearning for things to be different, and they’re not. To wish it weren’t this way, and it is. That knowledge is a shrine in some way, a place that benefits from an offering. Its presence is solemn, but a step on the road to inner peace.

Even when I don’t know what to do, and I don’t have answers, I can still do something. In my work, I often find that the strength of a moment is not found in having an answer, but in how I meet reality with that other person. Companionship, kindness, compassion, and presence are the means by which we receive their lives. We are not out to solve something as much as get to know it better, to become better friends with thing as they are. After a while, answers are not so important as being curious about what’s possible.

To live with not-knowing is not a retreat from life. It’s also not a decision to stay in a kind of no-mans-land and refuse from joining in. We all have our values, and it is our responsibility to live them out as best we can. When we feel moved to do something, we should do it, and life’s complexity is not an opportunity to excuse ourselves from showing up. To be unsure is a doorway for each of us to step through.

None of this is explored with the suggestion that answers don’t exist. The confidence of our experience and what we wordlessly know to be true to ourselves is like a river, at once reliable and always changing. This kind of confidence is not threatened by transformation or the possibility of being wrong. Novelty and difference are not things to be afraid of. Instead, they are opportunities to know more deeply, to grow even closer to life itself.

The ‘answers’ in my life are things like understanding, patience, and generosity. They don’t require me to know everything, they just ask me to listen, and pay attention, and allow myself to be changed by what I hear. Even when things are uncertain, there’s a chance for me to draw close and connect with something.

To embrace not-knowing requires courage, and a willingness to be changed. It’s a perpetual experience of being without pressure and without security, completely open and interested in life. As we become more comfortable with curiosity, the more we begin to see ourselves. After all, who are we without wonder, without mystery? There is no human without questions, and it is in better questions that we begin to discover more of what might be out there for us. Sometimes these questions are difficult and challenging to face, but their capacity to harm is lessened by our own interest. The more light we offer with our attention, the less threatening their shadows become.

I worry about a life that is constantly sure of itself, capable of claiming everything as familiar. I worry about a life that can’t ask questions that are in search of relationship. I wonder about the security of answers that feel easy to reach, that require nothing of our interest and our senses.

Things are never static. To work with not-knowing is to join in life’s great unfolding, an experience of unraveling and weaving which, with our willingness, serves to strengthen all of our relationships. Not-knowing works gently with these threads, forever in the act of moving in space, putting something together. What we create is not dependent on certainty, a fixed and foreseeable thing. It is the blessing of creativity in its mystery, its amazement, its awe.

-Henry Miller

The trouble of weariness is that it is a thief, and a good one. It robs us of energy, of clarity, of purpose. With one hand it presses on the back of our neck, keeping our view of the world low and narrow. With the other, it reaches out and pockets whatever we have left: our joy, our perspective, our imagination. Our lives are slowly poached of light, and with each day the burden on our shoulders only grows heavier. Whether we are aware of it or not, we begin to carry a weight that is impossible to bear alone.

I feel this weight in my body now, as I write. I am weary: weary of anger, of fear, of hatred. I am weary of watching us abandon each other, and ourselves. I grow stiff at the sight of stubbornness, of a refusal to change. The sneer of selfishness presses on me like a stone, the resolve of ignorance compressing my muscles. I am tired, lying at the bottom of my own well.

Perhaps what feels heaviest is not that these things exist “out there”, somewhere else in the world, but that they still lay within my own heart. I have not overcome anything which tires me, and so the world’s situation is my own. I cannot be separated from what wounds me, so where can I expect myself to go?

In my weariness I am tempted to admit that it is safe here, at least. I can remove my heart from the world, and say that it was other people who took it away. I can recede, withdraw, and claim that I am only protecting myself. I can go into silence, silence that looks for nothing and no one, a muffled quiet blocking out anything which might disturb an isolated, fragile peace.

When we are wearied by the world, when it seems that distress and resentment have claimed their victory, the chance to close the door on our heart is tantalizing. Why keep it open? What promises would compel us, what words could ever encourage us otherwise? It may seem like hoping for anything different was a fool’s errand all along, that we were right about each other. We’ll never get over our suspicion, our biases, our impulses to hurt and inflict pain. As we encircle ourselves in self-protection, we can at least be assured of safety.

It is these kinds of moments, moments in which light itself cannot seem to escape the gravity of pressure, that everything becomes possible. It may have looked like I was describing a hopeless situation, and we are paradoxically far from that. We are compressed, rage and violence pushing us deep into the earth, but not buried. If there is any danger, it is in staying still, in saying “yes” to the way in which weariness applies its weight.

A safety that comes from retreat, from giving up and giving in, is an enticing prospect. We can still have our lives, our comforts, our preferences, all without the interference of other people or the world at large. We can say that we did our best, and that things are now out of our hands. However the world unfurls itself is not really our problem anymore.

But this safety is not whole, and does not include the truth of ourselves. It is a safety patched together by the very same things we are hoping to avoid. This safety is angry, it is afraid, it is resentful and hostile and mean. It blames the world for failing, while ignoring that we continue to be involved. While we claim our withdrawal is looking out for ourselves, we add to the emotions and impulses that we wish would change. Our safety is built from our weariness, a castle made of sand.

If we look for wholeness expecting to be safe, we will not find it. Wholeness does not usher us away from the world, and will not shield us from what is painful and difficult. In other words, wholeness is not about safety, but about risk.

The challenges and stresses of our humanity, be it hatred, discrimination, or fear, are not risky attitudes or behaviors. They do risk the lives of others, but they do not risk the life of the individual. For example, we often refer to acts of violence as cowardly. Why? Because we understand that an act of violence lashes out, striking from a place of relative safety. The victim’s life and well-being has been risked completely: but the aggressor only commits violence when they feel safe enough to do so.

The same is true for ignorance, for indifference, for greed. These attitudes risk nothing because they fear the world, and how the world changes. Greed already knows its limitations, and therefore senses its own destruction. It is violent because of this knowledge, attacking the world out of its own insecurity. The desire to control, to consume, to be a master of all circumstances, is threatened in the natural movement of life. Any ‘safety’ found is an illusion, imposed at the expense of many.

On the other hand, change is inherently risky. We don’t know what will happen. Life is change, and so life is risky. Does this give us an excuse to be suspicious and hostile? No, and that is the secret doorway that wholeness calls us to pass through. Because wholeness embraces change, it also accepts our capacity to live with risk: not risk as “potential danger”, but risk as possibility itself.

What else is risky? Compassion, love, understanding, relationship: all of these things are risky, and risk embracing change each day. Why are they risky? Because they have no guarantees. They are not “safe” because they lack promises, assurances, guarantees.

Discrimination, for example, promises safety under the guise of a promise. As long as I distrust/hate/act against someone, or another group of people, I (or my group) will be safe. If I do this my entire life, no harm will come to me. In fact, if I increase my discrimination (such as through violence), I might even be able to guarantee safety even more quickly. The more people I hurt, or kill, or oppress, the safer I will become.

My open question is to consider how “safe” we really are when we live a life in this way. What is the quality of life in that smallness, that imprisoned heart? What hope, what movement, is to be found in waking up each day and reaching for a weapon, thinking about who we can hurt?

Instead, something like compassion just says “let’s see”. I think, at this time, nothing could be more important than that invitation. That is true risk, the risk of accepting the incredible, limitless potential of the human heart. There is no reward for being kind, there are no material benefits in forgiveness. Especially in a world that celebrates selfishness, we will not be acknowledged for generosity, or remembered for our grace. These actions risk everything, precisely because we might become someone different as a result. We step into the unknown, and trust that there is something there for us.

In recent days I have wondered about how much we actually know about understanding, of love, of kindness. I think we’ve hardly scratched the surface of what they can mean, what they can offer. These things are more than just attitudes, they are whole ways of being. They are the gateways into real safety, safety that only comes from embracing the risk of their action.

Our culture laughs at these qualities, scoffing at their seemingly simple and misguided intentions. So much of our attitude today pretends to know everything about them, without ever actually exploring. We claim that we’re smarter, more ‘realistic’ than whatever love and peace can show us. Although the harm is plain to see, we still believe that conflict and competition serve us better.

We may also say that it isn’t worth it. Kindness and compassion are risky because we can get burned for practicing them. People can take advantage of us, or ridicule our intentions. If the results of living like this are not immediately visible or rewarding, we might not understand how they add any value at all. Why invest for unknown gain when you can get rich quick?

I’m not sure how helpful these questions are, in the end. I don’t think they allow us to embrace risk, which is the path of wholeness itself. If we wish to be whole, if we wish for life to be whole, than we have to risk these experiences.

We cannot approach them if we are still held by doubt and confusion. To risk light is to risk not-knowing, to accept that we may not fully understand or bear witness to the results of our actions. We open the door, but we do not know who or what will step through it. Nevertheless, the opening means everything. To be the one who opens the door of their heart, even if the echoes of slamming doors reverberate around them: that is what wholeness calls us to be.

I am reminded of a patient of mine (we’ll call him Chris) who had been deeply harmed by selfishness and greed. Chris was injured in a workplace incident, pushed beyond what was reasonable or acceptable for his body. The result was months in the hospital, multiple surgeries, his body riding the edge of brokenness. He hadn’t seen his children since he was first hospitalized, and suffering from profound physical pain. No one from his job had reached out in concern, abandoning him to his fate.

When I first met Chris, I met him in intense, understandable anger at those who had wronged him. Despite the stress of his hospitalization, he was planning lawsuits against his former employer, gathering evidence, waiting for his opportunity to make his wrong right. We explored his anger, the moments he had been pushed too far, the ways in which his job had exploited his desire to help others. Surfacing his rage and grief, we discovered a need for change, for relationship, and an opportunity to live a more peaceful life.

Eventually, Chris asked for a prayer. In prayer we sat with all he had been through and all that might come next. We asked for peace, for wisdom, and for understanding. As the prayer concluded, I looked up to see tears pouring down Chris’s face. “Thank you”, he said, “thank you. No one has prayed for me since I was ten years old. No one has come to see me in four months except for my mom and my girlfriend. You came.”

This moment together became a brief but powerful journey for Chris to understand the ways he wanted to take deeper care of himself and seek greater peace in his life. I bring this encounter up because it captures, in some way, what it means to risk more light. I didn’t have to see Chris: he hadn’t asked for me, and there were plenty of other patients I could have seen. Chris didn’t have to spend time with me: he could have stayed in his anger, focused on his revenge, kicked me out of the room. These things could have happened, and the world would have gone on.

Yet something happened in that time with Chris, something that matters and something that is still unknown to me. “I” didn’t do anything: Chris and I simply met each other and risked something together. To witness a shift for him was moving for me; and, I don’t know what became of him or what has happened in his life afterwards. I only know that we both chose to risk. Rather than remaining in the safety of our individual lives, we met the world through each other, and something happened because of it. What that “thing” is cannot be said: I only know that it matters.

We can speak all day about the ways in which we harm each other. Our disrespect, our derision, the terrible river of violence that we insist upon the world each day: we know this story, its beginnings and endings. Since the very beginning of our species we’ve been plagued by these challenges; and it is likely we will continue to struggle with them. So much of our time and energy is spent consuming the ways in which we fail to show up for each other and the world. What more can be said of it? How much longer do we need to chew its bitter flavor until we begin to heal these things within our own hearts?

I am tired of pacing the cell of my own weariness. I do not wish to live within the relative safety of being cut off. Without dismissing the need for concern, I wonder if we can risk more of what our hearts tell us to go towards. I wonder if we can throw the door of our lives open, ushering in our love and care for the world, no matter what demand or sacrifice might be required. To offer the whole of our humanity for no reason other than the miracle of being alive. To trust that kindness, generosity, and understanding move us towards something we have yet to see.

We can, and should, risk the light of such a life.

-Pema Chödrön

It is unlikely we are ever going to “think” our way towards wholeness in our lives. It’s not an experience we can “figure out”, as if it were a problem that needs our constant attention. A problem requires a solution, and wholeness is neither a problem that needs solving nor a solution that will fix everything.

Wholeness is something much more expansive, available to us despite the problems that we have in life. Rather than something to resolve, it is an exploration of deep transformation, a challenging and exciting encounter of change and self-discovery. Somehow, it is very mysterious and familiar at the same time, representing what we already know of ourselves and the parts yet to be revealed.

If we approach wholeness with an attitude of problem-solving, we’re going to meet a lot of frustration and difficulty along the way. This is because we will quickly find that we’re not even sure what the problem is, or what the solution might even be. We’re not totally clear on what it is we’re looking for, but still feel that something needs to be sought out and fixed. We may also have a vague sense that once we find that solution, life will irreversibly sort itself out and everything will get better.

This desire to problem-solve our lives can be influenced by the strange reality that, while we don’t enjoy having problems, there’s a part of us that enjoys having problems. The mind is always searching for something to chew on, looking for situations that we can latch onto. It’s not enough to experience something as it is-we feel the need to break things down and inspect them. Problem-solving makes life simpler in some ways: situations are easier to identify, and we don’t have to deal with uncertainty. If there’s a Point A, then all we have to do is figure out how to get to Point B.

Problem-solving is not a bad thing from a practical point of view, but if we’re only engaging that part of ourselves, we’re working with one hand tied behind our back. Especially on the journey of wholeness, we’re never going to be fully satisfied with our experience of life. We’ll find that the fundamental “problem” will always feel unsolved, even if we discover temporary solutions. There will always be the sense that we need something more.

We may also feel that if we think hard enough or long enough about things, we’ll suddenly arrive to a “lightbulb” moment, an event of clarity and full understanding that will never leave our heads. This experience would be life-changing: everything would be figured out, with no more confusion or stress about what to do in life. While it sounds great, it’s unfortunately not so easy. Perhaps fortunately, it’s a lot more interesting than that.

The title of this writing points at a dimension of approaching wholeness beyond problem-solving, relaxing our perpetual need to scrutinize things and figure them out. Wholeness is ultimately something we have to live. It’s not enough to think about it: we have to feel it, taste it, touch it, and so on. It becomes the air we breathe, the stability that supports our bodies and everyday life. It is not the discovery of something that isn’t there to begin with, but a continuous clarification of something naturally present. Instead of something that we gain, wholeness is an experience that we uncover, bit by bit.

“Thinking with an open heart” was a phrase that came up unexpectedly, while I was recently sharing with a friend. While it made sense for our conversation, I spent some time later reflecting on what I meant by it. You may have already noticed that it presents an oxymoron, at least in the English and Western understanding of consciousness. In our usual sense of things, we don’t “think” with our heart. Thinking is for the brain, while the heart is for feeling. What’s more, we tend to prioritize thinking and mental activity for making things happen in the world, getting things done. By comparison, the feeling heart is often treated as weak and unreliable. With this in mind, the idea of thinking with an open heart may seem rather strange and unfamiliar.

From my personal point of view, which comes from many years of meditation and contemplative practice, human life contains an incredible amount of emotional intelligence which can support our experience of wholeness. Unfortunately, Western culture lacks an appreciation and investment in emotional awareness, which is why our feelings can seem foreign and difficult to understand. As a male-identified person, I’ve lived much of my life being told that the wisdom of what I feel needs to be suppressed, in favor of my logical mind and focusing on what’s ‘rational’.

At the present moment, I see no contrast between how my rational and emotional worlds can support me, and rely on both of them to discern what wholeness means in my life. From the perspective of Buddhist psychology, which is a perspective I share, “mind” is a term that includes both intellectual and emotional activity. There is no sense of separation between the brain and heart, as they both represent consciousness itself. Instead of preferring the use of one over the other, we can experience both as a function of our conscious intelligence.

Because there is awareness present in both our emotions and our intellect, a life of wholeness is one that seeks to clarify and refine how we are being shaped by these influences. How we feel about something is very important, just as important as the time we take to think something through. We often refer to having a “good feeling” about a person, or how a situation “just didn’t feel right”. This is the wisdom of our emotional life coming forward.

Using our consciousness in full allows us to appreciate life in a completely different way. Importantly, it takes us beyond the need to be right and the fear of being wrong. To think with an open heart means dropping our habit of using thinking for the purpose of being correct, which is a function of problem-solving. In a culture that prioritizes the intellect, we often use this ability to present ourselves as capable, clever, or confident.

If we rely only on our intellectual intelligence, we shield ourselves from having a direct encounter with our lives. As someone who tends towards an intellectual perspective, I’ve seen myself do this quite often. Rather than face the unknown, or allow myself to feel the texture of something and trust what that exploration can show me, I can cover it up with explanations. I can start creating ‘logical loopholes’ that avoids engaging something scary, overwhelming, or difficult. Proposing solutions, at times, takes away from something that is just demanding to be felt. Sometimes, things don’t need to be figured out: they need to be encountered and experienced in order for a path forward to emerge.

When we’re over-reliant on thinking, we’re really only considering ourselves, even if we’re thinking about other people. It’s engaging our ideas about something or someone, which, unless we’re really trying, isn’t going to go much farther than our own preferences and interpretations. Our thinking becomes a kind of shield, or even a weapon that protects us from being uncomfortable. Why would we want the embarrassment of being wrong, or unsure? There is a fear of vulnerability, and we can use our intellect to explain or justify things away. In doing so, we keep ourselves safe from exploring things we’d rather not look at. We build walls with our thinking, rather than bridges.

Thinking with an open heart is a more balanced way of approaching our life, the world, and other people. It uses our intellect without an underlying need to dominate, control, or manipulate situations in our favor. We stop holding life at arm’s length, and instead discover a willingness to engage life fully, absent of a desire for resolution or for our world to stay the same. It’s stepping into reality with bravery, to say “Here I am! I’m not sure what will happen, but I am here.”

On the path of wholeness, we draw from the well of our full consciousness, which includes feelings and emotions. This doesn’t make life unreliable; it just means we’re willing to be invested in the mystery of the whole situation. Embracing mystery is not about making things unclear on purpose. It’s a choice to be a lifelong learner, to use our ability to think and feel for the benefit of being in deeper relationship with reality. The journey along the way is not one of endless confusion, but a more honest knowledge of oneself and a readiness to open up to greater discovery.

The need to be right, to solve, to be able to explain everything, should be questioned. If anything, it’s a defense mechanism that worries about whether we actually know what to do in life. The Greek philosopher Socrates (according to Plato) has the famous line: “I only know that I know nothing”. Wholeness is not an experience of knowing everything, or being able to solve all problems through the intellect. It is a life in relationship with the sum of reality: the joy, the anger, the fear, the boredom, the uncertainty. If we can do that, we’re not turning any of those things into problems that need fixing.

A great example of thinking with an open heart is the exercise of “putting oneself in another’s shoes”. When you do this, you’re not claiming that you know exactly what the other person is experiencing-you just take the leap of considering someone beyond yourself. This is more than an intellectual act: you have to use your imagination, your creativity, your emotions. You have to lean into what that other person may be feeling, sensing, and experiencing in their life. If we do this well, this changes us. We realize that reality is a much larger experience than our own perspective of things, and this is an invitation to explore and connect with that further.

When we think with an open heart, we allow our thinking to become more invested, more sensitive, more interested in possibilities. It’s an expression of having an open mind. We don’t use our thinking to build walls of opinion that we can hide behind. In fact, it becomes very unsafe for our sense of self-importance. We realize that we don’t have all the answers, and that’s a good thing. We can contribute what we can and feel optimistic about discovering more as we grow in our lives. The people, events, and situations we encounter can all become teachers that have something to offer.

This is something I try to be aware of in my own writing. Writing is not a bad medium to work with, but it involves a lot of thinking and forming concepts out of lived experiences. I’m aware of its limitations, and do not write because I’m trying to be correct about everything. Anything written here is hardly the final say, and never fully represents the “thing” itself. I have no clue if I’m right about any of these ideas- and I don’t feel the need to be “right”, either. I only know what has worked in my experience, and offer that in the hope that it might, in some small way, resonate with someone else.

Thinking with an open heart doesn’t treat being unsure as a problem: it recognizes this experience as a necessary step towards understanding. When we open up to our life in fullness, there is no distress when confronting the unknown. It’s an attitude of “I don’t know! How interesting.” Of course, we can’t stay in being unsure: having no opinions is just as limiting as having too many. The experience of being unsure is an invitation to keep going, to pursue a greater welcoming of life itself.

We have to be unsure in order to learn something. If we think we’re right all of the time, we don’t learn from life nor do we make the effort to do so. Wholeness in its inclusivity makes the experience of being unsure a point of movement, rather than something we get stuck in (like doubt). We get interested and involved in what our life is telling us. From this perspective, we can use the best of our natural intelligence to walk with curiosity, using the territory of thoughts and feelings to connect with a wider world of experience.

In Western culture, we encourage each other to “think for yourself”. I might add that we also need to “think for others”, or, to think beyond just ourselves. Think for possibility, for openness, for the experience of being whole. This is not always an easy thing to do, as it can challenge our personal certainty and desire for easy solutions. However, it is a path to a kind of freedom-not being bound by what we think, but being led forward into greater relationship with life. If we can follow this, all kinds of doors begin to open, and hidden paths reveal themselves.

-Tibetan proverb

The human journey is always concerned with action. We have a life, and there’s a constant question about what to do with it. Life can feel like a huge, blank canvas which needs to be filled with things that aren’t currently there. Action is how we fill that space, the stick by which we measure the quality of our life and the quality of the world.

Because something is always going on, there’s persistent concern around how that’s going. Are we enjoying this? Are we doing enough? Is this experience pleasant, satisfying, inspiring? Is it difficult, discouraging, or stressful? Whether we’re making breakfast or a major life decision, there seems to always be some quality of assessment involved. Do I like what’s happening? Am I making the most of this?

This enduring scrutiny of our actions becomes a bit of a tightrope. Everything is conditional, very dependent on our personal criteria of good and bad, success and failure. Life gets very busy with attempting to maintain our criteria, to make sure things happen as we expect or want them to. In a way, it’s a set-up for disappointment. We can either have a fleeting satisfaction, or the sense that things are definitely not okay, not going to plan.

I bring this up because, in addition to our individual lives, there are many things in this world right now that are not okay, which involve us. They are far beyond any sense of acceptability, a clear violation of our expectations of the world. There’s a natural urge to act in response, to do something about what we know is unacceptable. To do nothing would be a contradiction, to imply that we’re okay with what’s happening. But what to do?

Every action we take is an affirmation of the world we feel we are a part of. Whether we are aware of it or not, we are expressing ourselves constantly, painting on the canvas of our life and the life of everything. Each action is a brushstroke, a statement about us. Even if it doesn’t seem that significant, we are always communicating what matters to us, what we value, how we wish to move through the world. It’s not something we can think about too hard (that scrutiny again!), and yet we have to take tremendous responsibility for it. Why? Because our actions are involved in the world we live in right now. We play a shared role in everything we witness.

Behind each action is also the feeling that we have to get somewhere with our activity, whether it’s for ourselves or for others. Usually, our sense of action implies an awareness of a goal: we do something now for the sake of something else in the future. Life is a constant process of moving from one point to the next.

And yet, despite all of our activity, even a brief glance at the world today might suggest that we’re not getting anywhere at all. We’ve never been busier, but for what? Where is it taking us? Are we even aware of where we’re going, or why? Our busyness seems to lack a quality of intention, which often ignores the consequences of how our actions can create a harmful and destabilizing world.

There are many good things we want to accomplish, for our present and for our future. Especially in difficult times, our activity is an attempt to address what we believe isn’t working, creating what we feel isn’t there and should be. We have a sense of “rightness” that we’d like to achieve, and we enthusiastically give our energy towards reaching that. Maybe that “rightness” is expressed by having cleaner water, safer housing, better relationships in our communities. A world without war, without weapons, a place where everyone can live completely and peacefully. These are all important things to work for, and well worth our efforts.

At the same time, these are just ideas. For example, our idea of peace can be quite different from someone else’s. You may want to work together with others to accomplish peace, but someone else may want to kill or hurt people for it. You don’t agree with this, and you have to say something about that. You feel that peace comes without violence; they are convinced that violence is the only way. Ideas of peace begin to fight each other. Very quickly, any chance for real peace disappears. It becomes a big battle over who is more right about what “peace” is. We get absorbed in fighting ideas about peace that we disagree with. Eventually, in the effort to accomplish peace, we stop working for real peace.

This becomes exhausting and discouraging. We had hoped for real peace in the beginning, but despite our actions something doesn’t appear to be working. There is a fear that people don’t want to help each other. No matter how much we do, nothing seems to change. People continue to fight, peace feels farther and farther away. The situation appears hopeless, and we begin to despair.

Hope and despair are very intimate experiences, although we often think very differently about them. Hope suggests being full of action, doing many good things constantly and with great energy. Despair suggests that action is no longer effective or meaningful. We could say that hope describes the presence of action, despair the absence of it.

Hope and despair are related because they represent one idea, one vision of the world. To their credit, they are both conscious of possibility, of things being different. However, they are driven by a single idea: our idea. In our example of peace, our actions for peace are motivated by our definition of that, regardless of whether other people share it. We may agree on this idea with others, but it is still one idea, which as we have seen can come into conflict with other ideas. Despair reflects this singular concept too: if we haven’t accomplished our idea of peace, then peace seems impossible. “The world is ending”, we say. It seems like we have run out of possibilities, and no amount of activity will change that.

Hope and despair share the belief that only one thing can and should happen. Actions are often motivated by a vision for one solution. It’s like going “all-in” on a hand of cards: there’s only one way to win the game, so to speak. The stakes are raised to the highest degree. If we win, then we get everything we hoped for. If we lose, we lose everything.

I’ve included the proverb above from the Tibetan people because it points to another way of action, a reality beyond a single result. I first encountered it at a time in my life where the stakes of my activity in the world felt very intense and serious. I felt like I needed to make something happen because some state of the world depended on it. When I came across this verse, it stopped me in my tracks. What does this mean, to abandon hope of all fruition? Are the Tibetans asking us to give up, to sit on the sidelines?

Not at all, and the Tibetan people represent a human journey that is far from giving up on themselves or their own situation. From my point of view, they are suggesting the need for real activity, actions that constantly operate in the world of possibility itself. This activity transcends the hope for something specific happening, because that’s only an idea. Who knows if it will come to be? It also refuses to despair, as despair takes us out of action entirely. Real activity is beyond any sense of accomplishment or failure. It is deeply energetic, self-sustaining, and present to reality in its complexity and change.

To use our example of peace again, working for real peace is to abandon the hope of peace as an idea manifesting in the world. It’s like wanting everyone to know what strawberries taste like: but instead of talking about the taste, you have to start growing strawberries and sharing them with others. The difference between describing the taste of strawberries and the actual taste is huge. If you want someone to know what strawberries taste like, you can’t talk or argue with them about it. They have to taste it themselves. We have to get beyond our ideas and embrace the real thing.

Our idea of peace is not real peace, it is only a concept. A utopia is one example of this. A utopia is a positive idea that can lead to good actions, but it is not a reality. A utopia is not something that actually exists in real life. To work for real peace is not to work for the idea of peace. Real peace is much more dynamic than that. Real peace includes the whole world, which is more than one idea and experience. This is what it means to live together, to live in harmony: not a world of people living one idea, but many ideas and experiences working together.

If we confuse our idea of peace with real peace, then we’re looking at only one side of a coin. The idea of peace also implies that there is only non-peace in the world, and we need to replace that non-peace with peace. We will hope and act for peace, while despairing at the experience of non-peace.

This is not the whole situation. Peace and non-peace exist together; there are places in the world that are peaceful and places that are not. To go even further, there are people experiencing non-peace in peaceful places, and vice-versa. It is a very challenging and frustrating situation, but that’s where we need to act. It is not a matter of sitting on the fence, it is about embracing the fullness of reality which is more than one thing.

When the Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh was asked about the situation in his home country in the 1960s, he simply said, “Everything is destroyed”. He spent the rest of his life working for real peace in Vietnam and in the world at large. This is an expression of acting beyond hope and despair. Thich Nhat Hanh was not being casual with his words: he really meant it. It wasn’t just the land that was destroyed, it was whole communities, relationships, futures, entire ways of life. Everything was falling apart, yet he did not fall into despair. His life’s work was to embody and communicate the possibility of real peace, present amidst complete destruction.

It is no bad thing to hope: each of us carries a small dream that enables us to continue, to carry-on and contribute to something more. We do this not because it’s a fantasy, but because we have at some point experienced what we know is possible: real peace, real harmony, real community. We know the taste. It’s here in the world and it is our responsibility to nurture that presence.

Perhaps “real hope”, then, is putting our energy into actions without concern for particular results. Maybe we will accomplish everything we want to see, maybe we won’t. Maybe we will learn to exist in greater balance with our natural world, refreshing the air and clearing the water. Maybe we will end all wars everywhere, and live without violence. Maybe we will destroy our planet, and ourselves, completely. Who can say? What may happen doesn’t seem to be the point: what matters is what we are doing right now in this very moment.

To cling to results is, in some ways, one road to despair. They are never quite what we imagine them to be, and the longer they contrast with our ideas about the future, the more dispirited we can become. This is not an invitation to stop showing up, it is an encouragement to act with deeper purpose, without conditions. Attached to our ideas, we are tempted to stop or give up if our actions do not emerge in expected outcomes. Abandoning hope of all fruition, a more enlivened, unshakeable activity becomes possible.

This activity is all around us in nature. Trees, rivers, and mountains do not produce themselves to accomplish something. There is no goal for nature, nature simply acts. There is no rush, only constant rhythm. A flower bud does not ‘hope’ to blossom, it just participates in blossoming. Should something happen, and the blossoming does not come, there is no despair, the world does not end. Flowers continue to bloom regardless. Winter does not arrive to “accomplish winter”, a flowing river is not trying to make something particular happen. There is only action itself. Flowers, winter, and rivers all act in relation with each other, without goal and participating in a shared existence.

Activity is always happening in the natural world, beyond any ideas of hope or despair. There is something oddly beautiful about this. Our love for nature recognizes this boundless quality, and it can provide constant inspiration for our own actions.

Because we are a part of nature, we can act with a similar energy. We can place the fullness of body and mind into creating good things, doing what is needful, taking care of our lives. This wholeness of activity does not ignore what is necessary to look at, and it does not hesitate to show up when asked. Most importantly, it never loses sight of real hope, which is beyond any kind of outcome. It does not seek to create a certain future as much as it lives, right now, what is possible. Rather than despair at what we perceive to be absent, we can act through embodying what we know is absolutely present.

To end this exploration for now, I leave us with the words of the Trappist monk and author Thomas Merton, who in his own context echoes this call for enlivened action:

“Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.” 
-Thomas Merton, Letter to a Young Activist

-Marcus Aurelius

This is Part 3 in a three-part series exploring the topic of suffering, beginning with Encountering Suffering and continuing with Guided by Moonlight.

The last piece examined an individual experience of suffering, and I’d now like to explore how we can meet the suffering found throughout the world. It may seem like everywhere you look, there is cruelty, profound injustice, and disregard for human life. We bear witness to people suffering in ways that are beyond measure. If that’s not enough, we have our own lives, with our own struggles and challenges. How do we hold all of that? Where do we even start?

Unfortunately, we are confronting a story that is as old as humanity itself. We have not yet found our way, a way that escapes our habits of hurting each other and ourselves. It can seem like every chance we have to do something different is wasted. Every opportunity to change is ignored, and we repeat ourselves. Violence, greed, and hatred go on. Suffering continues because we sustain it, day after day.

What’s particularly unique about this moment is how we encounter this suffering. Technology, for better or for worse, has given us an opportunity to experience suffering almost first-hand, in a very raw and emotionally intense way. If you wanted to, you could be plugged into every sorrow, every display of inhumanity, 24/7. Our lives can be filled with nothing but the images, videos, and sounds of people being harmed.

The benefit of this increased exposure is that calls to action and responsibility can be communicated quickly. We can learn, understand, and engage with suffering all over the world in ways that are faster and potentially more effective than at any point in our history. It also becomes harder and harder to live in ignorance, which I think is a good thing.

The downside is that this affects us in ways that we may not even recognize. If we’re not careful, our experience of the world can be fractured and overwhelming. We become aware of too much at one time, without the tools to process it. When this happens, our relationship with suffering loses its potential in awakening compassion. It becomes suffering without meaning.

Suffering is movement: an internal and external process that shifts our perspective of self and world. It is not something that is meant to be captured and held tightly. Suffering is motion, and the direction it takes in our experience is up to us.

If we are to understand suffering as a generative force, then we have to know how to engage with it. If it’s merely something to consume, to “drink from the firehose” of the world’s pain, then we endanger ourselves and others. We’re not actually connected with reality, and we put ourselves at risk for despair, hopelessness, or simply not caring at all.

Relating to suffering in a meaningful way means that we are called to be present to it. In being present, we are allowing what we observe to affect and move us: not for the sake of distress, but for the sake of change. We don’t run away, we don’t resist (deny) the experience, and neither do we fall into despair. Being present is a doorway to being made different, a path towards taking responsibility.

We might say this presence has a quality of curiosity, interest at the level of compassion or care. It’s the silent question of “What is this? What’s happening here?”. It has an almost neutral flavor to it, but not because we feel neutral about the situation. It’s just openness, experiencing the gap between experience and reaction. We are allowing ourselves to pause: because in that pause is an opening, an opportunity to see suffering for what it is and how we might respond.

Here’s an example from my current work in clinical spiritual care. When I’m called to a room because a family’s loved one is moments from death, I have no thoughts about what I’m going to do or say when I walk into that room. Most times, I am working with minimal information: a couple of names, a diagnosis, some background. Beyond that, I have no idea what I’m walking into. However, there are two things that are clear to me: suffering is present, and I want to be present to that suffering.

How do I do this? I listen. I don’t try and control the situation. I let the family or patient (if they’re able) tell me about their experience. I hear stories, concerns, needs, anxieties. I allow for their emotions to be expressed. It is not my place to assume I know what is happening and what should be done about it. Caring actions come from listening, and allowing suffering to be in motion. I don’t try to internalize it, get rid of it, or put it away somewhere. I let it be there, with curiosity about where it might go through the course of my encounter.

This family might in despair, in anger, in denial, you name it. For me, that’s not a problem that needs fixing. Their emotions are valid and understandable given the situation. A problem would arise if I was despairing, angry, or denying along with them. Again, this does not mean I’m not expressing concern or compassion. I’m right alongside them and supporting everything they’re feeling. What I don’t do is join in the suffering, to act as if I’m experiencing what they’re experiencing. I’m not. It’s my responsibility to show up, to hold them in their grief and do the needful, but not to center myself. It’s not about me; it’s about them.

This is very important. If I introduce more suffering to the situation through my own reactions, is that a helpful response? If I am as overwhelmed as they are, as afraid or anxious, how can I serve them? Embodying strength through presence, peace, and relationship is what offers genuine support. It signals that there is a way through suffering, that we can move through this moment together. Or, maybe they just need some help in holding something difficult. Whatever the situation, being present shows that I see them, and am fully there for their sorrow. This is not passively receiving what’s going on: it is an active interest in what’s unfolding.

This way of showing up is very different from how we engage with suffering generally. Overwhelmingly, we encounter suffering passively and reactively. We don’t take the time to be present, and jump straight to our personal thoughts, feelings, and judgments about whatever’s happening. There’s a time for reaction, but we tend to exploit that time. Particularly through social media, we see this often: in the comments section, in the replies, it’s a constant stew of people reacting. We think we’re responding to the situation, but often we’re living out our own personal drama, and perhaps using someone else’s suffering as the means to carry that out.

It’s this kind of pattern that has deepened our sense of polarization, the thickening of that “us vs them” mentality. We gauge one another based on our reactions, and organize each other accordingly. Did that person react “well” enough? Did they say the right thing? Wrong thing? Did I find what they said attractive? Gross? Did they respond to suffering as much as they “should” have? This can go on and on, and in the end, we’ve gone nowhere. We still lack a meaningful relationship to suffering, and have fractured our relationships with one another as a result.

In reality, there is no “them”. There is only us. We are a part of the whole picture, even though it’s easy to think that we are responsible to some things and not others.

I remember back in 2016, when Donald Trump was elected president. That weekend, I went to the Sunday gathering of my local Sangha at that time (Sangha is a word which means “community of practice” in Buddhist circles). During their talk, our guiding teacher suggested that we engage in loving-kindness meditation for the new president. According to his perspective, it seemed like he could really use it. My community was openly shocked, outraged even. How could we? We were not like him, we would never say or do things like he does. He didn’t deserve it.

I was intrigued by my teacher’s idea. This was a liberal person, guiding a generally liberal community in a liberal city. If I had to guess, our collective politics compared to the President’s couldn’t have been more different. What was his motivation for suggesting this?

Looking closely, it was his way of saying, “there is only us”. Whether you voted for him or not, Donald Trump was our president (although many of us like to say “that’s not my president” based on our political affiliation). Further, many of the qualities that people dislike about him are also in us. Have we not experienced anger at some point in our life? Defensiveness? Bias, judgment? Hatred, ignorance? We know the burden of those feelings, and we share that experience, even if it isn’t in the same context or expression. To say “we’re not like him” isn’t completely true. Maybe we don’t live like him, or make choices like him, but we have shared those qualities at one point or another.

My teacher’s suggestion came out of the understanding that, while we as a community were aware of these negative emotions and trying to transform them, the president was not. By his estimation, President Trump was not aware that his way of being in the world was causing himself and others pain. His suggestion to offer him loving-kindness, to generate well-being on his behalf, came out of compassion. At the very least, our community could work to support his transformation: not in agreement with his choices, but in the hope that he could choose differently and live a different quality of life.

There is only us, and we all suffer. If we are to discover wholeness, we must recognize this. To separate our suffering only makes things worse. It sets in motion the “Olympics of suffering” that I describe in Part 1. Antagonizing (which is different from urgency) or shaming (which is different from offering) one another into encountering suffering only prolongs the issue. What growth, what learning, what transformation can be had from that? They are attitudes which support the very conditions for suffering that we want to change.

It’s important not to bypass anything, and all healthy learning and growth should be uncomfortable to some degree. Suffering as we encounter it among others should feel like a direct appeal to our conscience. The urge to look away or avoid things should not come easily. If we’re not uncomfortable, then we haven’t taken a step towards the reality of others. We are likely still hiding from suffering in some way, not quite willing to face it.

Why face it? Because there is only us, and how we relate to the world affects other people. In a sense, your suffering is my suffering, your wholeness my wholeness. If I live an angry life, then I contribute to the anger that affects so many people today. If I live an ignorant life, one that avoids suffering and pretends not to hear what is obvious, then I consent for suffering to continue. If I spend my time ridiculing or scrutinizing others, then I help to make the world a more isolated, uncaring place.

On the other hand, if I know compassion within myself, I can be compassionate with others. If I live thoughtfully, I can be skillful when the suffering of others asks something of me. If I live with curiosity, I can learn to be in greater relationship with life.

Responsibility starts with how we relate to suffering from the place of our own life. The open questions are whether we’re going towards or running away, being a participant or a passive observer. The fact is, the world needs us. What are we bringing to it? More resentment, more fear, more indifference? Or more courage, more willingness, more warmth?

I know I can’t do everything. But I also believe that everything we do affects the world. I live in a country that makes weapons that have killed innocent people. Am I personally responsible for their deaths? No. Am I part of that reality? Absolutely. What matters then is how I recognize and respond to that relationship: not turning away from suffering, but neither making it my fault. If we place the weight of the world on ourselves, we will fail. We may think we’re taking responsibility: but in fact, we’re taking ourselves out of the picture. Under that terrible weight, we will be unable to move. Because suffering is movement, we need to be able to move with it in order to move through it.

I’m not in clinical spiritual care because I think I can end all of the suffering that I see and somehow take away the pain of the world. If I thought that, I’d probably burn out in a week from the effort. I’m in it because I know that everyone needs someone at some point in their lives. If I can be that person for them, if I can show up, then that is enough.

Whatever expression of suffering touches our heart, we can approach it the same way. Life is not asking us to make things perfect, to be able to right all wrongs and change every single thing that concerns us. It’s asking for us to be there, to be in relationship and live in relationship. It is all we can do, and it is all the difference.