It’s a common experience, needing to choose between what seem to be equally strong options. Literature is filled with reflections on the ‘what if’ someone made a different choice, and we can all look back and wonder about what might have been.
I’d like to discuss what we might call life-choices, which are more like stances or attitudes that we may take, and these choices need to be made not just once but they have to be owned and affirmed, developed, and with time we may settle into them and we live with them.
One of these has to do with memories. It may seem an odd thing to say, but in an important sense we choose our memories.
This idea is well expressed in a recent novel by Jack Serong, The Burning Island, (Text Publishing, 2020). The novel relates to extraordinary events amongst some of the early colonists in Sydney, one of whom has suffered the very painful illness and death of his wife. He holds on to her, though, by wearing her dresses at times, as a means of remembering. Late in the novel he speaks of his experience, remarking:
The pain was terrible. But I cannot think of that. We choose our memories, I believe. We take the recollections and assemble them and tend them like a garden. We proceed by small dignities. That is how you prevail. That is how you can stand up from your bed in the morning…
You may be feeling all these things, and choosing among them. You decide. You are fated to carry this all your days now, this loss. But you may alter its shape; that is the one grace permitted you. (page 338)
These are, I think, wonderful insights. We do not choose the painful things that come our way: major losses, trauma, and often violent deeds or so-called accidents, many of which have predictable causes. We do not choose the pain and loss, but we can choose how we live with them.
There are people who nurse their hurts and even make a career out of them.
There are people who try to deny they even happened. They will not think of them, will not speak of them, will not engage with anyone who reminds them of that time, that place, that experience.
These are choices, as too is the choice to find a way to live with and through and in a sense beyond that hurt.
Similarly, we choose to live with the memories of good times and major achievements: and they too provide choices. We can hold on to that happy day or that victory, in a way that is essentially stuck there. The certificate fades. The skills dissipate. The music fades. Here, too, we can choose what we do with these memories, to build on them, grow beyond them, become something more. This too is a life-choice
Recently I saw a quotation from Nick Cave, a beautiful piece about suffering. I do not know its original source, but quote it here and hope that some day I will find its context. It’s a note written to a person named Peter:
Dear Peter,
What do we do with our suffering? As far as I can see, we have two choices—we either transform our suffering into something else, or we hold onto it, and eventually pass it on.
In order to transform our pain, we must acknowledge that all people suffer. By understanding that suffering is the universal unifying force, we can see people more compassionately, and this goes some way toward helping us to forgive the world and ourselves. By acting compassionately, we reduce the world’s net suffering, and defiantly rehabilitate the world. It is an alchemical act that transforms pain into beauty. This is good. This is beautiful.
To not transform our suffering and instead transmit our pain to others, in the form of abuse, torture, hatred, misanthropy, cynicism, blaming and victimhood, compounds the world’s suffering. Most sin is simply one person’s suffering passed on to another. This is not good. This is not beautiful.
The utility of suffering, then, is the opportunity it affords us to become better human beings. It is the engine of our redemption.
Love, Nick.
What a brilliant analysis and reflection. It is clearly the wisdom of experience—and again reflects the choice we have.
Another great thinker once observed that the difference between human beings is not whether or now we have suffered, but what we have done with our suffering.
We choose our memories. We choose, that is, how we live with and from those things, painful and good, and thus whether or not we compound the world’s suffering, or add to its goodness and beauty.
There is no simple recipe for how we do this. Working it out is our life task. There is, however, one further choice that relates to these other challenges. Many of us have been taught, overtly or implicitly, that we have to make these choices for ourselves and work it out for ourselves, essentially by our own efforts—and this generates a great loneliness, a stress beyond bearing.
In truth, these life choices cannot be achieved on our own, each of us ‘making it’. We do not reach that redemption of which Nick Cave wrote alone. Together we transform that pain, by sharing it, opening ourselves to each other’s memories, and together we make something of it, more than we might have imagined, alone. This is good. This is beautiful. This is human.