When you’re looking at spiritual information online it is often full of happy clappy kumbaya and I personally find it all a bit…….well, irritating. I was at an event last week and was chatting to a young man about the fact his girlfriend had recently cheated on him and their relationship had ended. “It’s all good” he said, “the relationship was a blessing even if it didn’t last” and I secretly rolled my eyes. If you have been in a relationship with someone you love and it ends it is abnormal not be sad. These things hurt deeply and you need time to process, grieve and re-calibrate. I would suggest that if you don’t spend at least some time crying on the bathroom floor and willing them to text you maybe you didn’t love them to begin with.

I then had a conversation with a friend the other day who was telling me about her decades of severe ill health and she said “it’s OK, everything happens for a reason” and I again found myself rolling my eyes. I didn’t spend 10 years of my twenties and thirties in bed suffering the tortures of hell every second of every day with a brain injury for any reason. I corrected my friend on the phone and said “not everything happens for a reason, but what we can do is try to make meaning out of the suffering” which is eventually what I’ve ended up doing, but honestly I’d rather have not lost a decade of some of the best years of my life and been less insightful.

What was the meaning in torturing, imprisoning and murdering 6 million Jews in the war? What is the meaning of the current inhumane suffering of women in Afghanistan, banned from speaking and only able to look out of one eye? What is the meaning in orphans poking their own eyes out in India as they can get more money street begging, or the meaning in children scavenging for food on rubbish dumps in Brazil? There is none.

On a much more trivial note, I had a 2 hour root canal done on Tuesday and have since been in agonising pain which was so bad at 3am one morning if I’d known how to take my own tooth out I would have done it. I’m now on antibiotics for an infection. I can find no meaning in that either.

While I believe we agree Soul contracts with those to whom we are Soul connected before embarking on a human life, there are also inevitably going to be things which happen that we didn’t choose or bargain on. The Covid pandemic, for example, the actions of other people over which we have no control, all manner of global and natural disasters such as war and famine…….the list is endless.

We do ourselves a dis-service when we fail to recognise that life contains despair just as much as it contains joy. When we gloss over negative events and emotions what we’re actually doing is disconnecting from ourselves – there is no Soul growth in that.

There’s another very trite saying which states “God doesn’t give us more than we can handle” and it’s nonsense. If this were true nobody would commit suicide. A friend of mine took his own life because he was having an acute mental health crisis and despite reaching out for help didn’t receive it. There was certainly no meaning in that for his Mum or Sister.

I have known absolute and utter despair. Lived through the darkest moments a Soul can take. Thought I couldn’t carry on for another second. Some things are simply endured.

Does my deep despair mean that I possibly appreciate joy in ways some other people don’t? I would think so, yes. But that doesn’t mean my despair had meaning, just that I’ve made the most of what was otherwise pointless suffering.

“Is your glass half empty or half full?” asked the mole. “I think I’m grateful to have a glass” said the boy.
The boy, the mole, the fox and the horse by Charlie Mackesy.

It is disingenuous to pretend that our life is always good. We only know happiness because we’ve experienced unhappiness. Only know peace because we’ve experienced chaos. We all have ups and downs, light and dark, joy and despair. Sometimes we can find deep meaning in the events we live through and other times none can be found and all we can do is hope that tomorrow will be a better day.