The Calm after the Storm

5 minute read

When all the suffering and bitterness within the souls and lives of those you love has quietened, when their lives have entered the course of a newly chosen destiny, you can only feel reconciled and happy for their peace.

When you have spent countless hours defending love, or lost entire years trying to forget the stormy years when everything around you was called Love; when your heart and soul have wept for what they desired but watched disappear like smoke; when nothing depends upon you - in the end, you are glad if those you love or once loved find peace and happiness in their lives.

Deep within, you know that this is actually the calm before another storm. If things failed once when life was peaceful, then the calm following the storm announces nothing good. Yet hope remains. Perhaps destiny has finally allowed itself to be deceived, or perhaps it has withdrawn to wait for another mistake or some unspoken desire, yours or someone else's, with which to fill your life once more with suffering.

An atheist friend told me that suffering for love is foolishness and that it would be better to suffer for something real, such as material deprivation, than for dreams. From his point of view, he was right.

Yet this is precisely why people who love each other suffer. A simple life is no longer enough; they wish to complicate it, sometimes sacrificing an entire lifetime in pursuit of illusions or professional achievement. Perhaps they find what they seek: greater happiness, or more often, prolonged suffering.

At first, life deceives you. It gives you the impression that you have chosen the right path. In the end, it hits you so hard that you wonder whether all your effort was worthwhile, and especially whether it was worth destroying the lives of those who loved you.

Our choices make us responsible for the destinies of those around us because they influence those people's future lives. Some drown their bitterness in drink, others in dozens of women, and others in drugs. Some cannot withstand the shock and the change and choose to disappear. Others surrender to the Divine Love within their hearts, knowing that in doing so they can never go wrong.

Most often, we blame those who forced us to choose what was placed before us, whether willingly or unwillingly. At other times, we say that we were not mature enough and did not know what we truly wanted when we declared our love. Sometimes we are simply without a compass. Although the clock ticks within the heart, we mistake it for a need for greater happiness and forget that we were once happy precisely because our lives contained so much peace.

When you confuse happiness with entertainment, suffering truly enters your life. Entertainment may offer temporary happiness by helping you forget the world in which you live, but true happiness is found not by fleeing yourself, but by discovering the self within.

At other times, you flee the noise and fury of a life that had once been so quiet in your solitude. Although calm returns after the inner storm when you follow your heart, you eventually discover that destiny has ensured still greater suffering. Your life may now contain so much peace, or at least it should appear that way now that you are alone with yourself again.

Religious people say that everything given to you serves your evolution, helping you discover your soul and the God within. Yet when we become instruments for teaching others a lesson, only to receive the same painful lesson ourselves, the situation is no longer so easy to accept, whatever reasons or explanations we offer.

How can you struggle against an implacable destiny lying open before you like a book even before you are born? How can you awaken, fall asleep, then awaken again, repeating the cycle until the body - which you have known since birth must one day disappear - finally sleeps forever?

In the past, I knew this difficult period would come. I felt it deeply within my soul. That is why I could show joy only when I put all the body's safety mechanisms to sleep. At other times, I showed great sadness, perhaps too much.

When the storm arrived, the shock was so powerful that I thought I would never escape its claws. I still have not escaped completely, but I have passed through the most difficult stages and made room for others that I suspect are coming but do not yet know.

I witness many events within myself, and that is what hurts most: being conscious enough to understand what you are passing through, knowing the cure and even the outcome, yet being unable to lift a finger to rise from the states you must endure.

Love truly does bring happiness and divine breath within when it appears and finds fulfilment. Yet when its external support disappears, the pain is so great that it feels as though molten lava were being poured down your throat. This is how fiercely the soul feels the pain of love.

In principle, such suffering should not exist when you still feel love, even after its support has vanished. But these states cannot simply be controlled. You either accept them or throw them into the darkness of oblivion, denying love and everything it brings.

You cannot drive love from the soul, because it exists there and is one with it. Only awareness is needed to awaken your perception of love's presence and manifestation. Yet you can become drunk upon the elixir of thought and hide in its recesses whatever might bring you both happiness and suffering.

Our religion may come closest to the giving of love through suffering: being happy because you suffer, and transforming suffering into happiness through love.

I could continue stammering many words about this subject, circling the real or imagined lived experience of love in all its complexity. What matters is that, when I look around, life is beginning to return to its ordinary course for some people, while others are only beginning the road of no return created by denying the love within them.

As for me, after all this time I have learnt to live with the wound within, to accept that this is my destiny and to rejoice in the happiness of others. I am happy when I see love beginning its journey in the souls of the young, or when the divine casts its shadow across our existence in those unique moments offered by nature.

My only consolation is the inner voice that continually whispers prayers and lived experiences into my heart, far beyond my human understanding, while I await the road that feels more inevitable with every passing day.

First published in Romanian on 21 February 2011. This English translation preserves the perspective of that period.

Original Romanian article: Liniștea după furtună.