The Heavy is Where You Find The Light
(Moving towards what makes you feel)
If you want to live well, you have to let the hurt in.
We all carry regrets. Loneliness. Physical aches and pains.
Life is filled with heavy parts.
So we often try our best to block the hurt out, to sandbag against the flood of emotion with whatever numbing agents we can find.
We play a video game all day and remember none of it. We disappear for hours into social media. We use work, alcohol, food, sex, sleep. Lots of options that feel kind of good but mostly just help you not feel so bad.
But fleeing from pain can’t lead you to joy.
When I was wrestling with the idea of proposing to my wife, I reached out to my uncle Lou for advice. I told him about my fears of a lifelong commitment, the challenges we’ve need to overcome together, the painful growth I would need to become the husband she deserved.
Lou told me that I was focusing on the wrong question.
The right question was not, “What am I afraid of?”
The right question is, “What does it mean to seek out the light? How do I move towards the good energy?
The heavy is where you find the light. If you try to avoid your fears, you also avoid your deepest fulfillment.
The commitment of marriage is heavy. And my life blazes with light because of her.
The weight of grief is heavy. And it’s the price you pay to have a love worth grieving.
The sting of rejection is heavy. And the courage to risk rejection will lead you to your tribe.
If you numb yourself out, you might skip the heavy, but you’ll definitely lose the light.
But if instead you move towards what makes you feel, your pain gets a purpose. Your suffering transforms in service of your joy. And the heavy parts get easier to carry, because you’re not carrying them in silence anymore.
So let in the heavy. And bask in the light.12
I owe the phrase “Heavy and light” to the organization To Write Love On Her Arms (https://twloha.com/heavy-and-light/).
I listened to this song and it made me cry and then I decided to write this post. Give it four minutes of your undivided attention. Maybe it’ll help you let in some heavy, too.