Do You Dare to Feel the Pain of the World?

BY SOFO ARCHON

When I experience beauty, I tend to also experience grief. That’s because encounters with beauty usually remind me of all the beauty that has been lost.

When I hike through a forest, I’m reminded of the billions of trees that are being cut down each year. When I swim in the sea, I’m reminded of the 150 million metric tons of plastic that have been dumped into the ocean. When I come across a turtle during my morning walks in nature, I am reminded of the 200 species that go extinct every single day.

I often feel that the world is crying in pain, and this makes me experience deep sorrow. But what I find even more saddening is that most people don’t seem to feel the same way.

For years, I thought that’s just because they are ignorant or even stupid. But at some point I came to realize something very different: People do know what’s going on, yet only on an unconscious level, and that’s because they’ve repressed their feelings associated with pain.

To come face-to-face with the destruction of the world can induce feelings of immense pain. And who dares to do that? Because of the traumatic experiences people have been through in their lives, the vast majority of them have developed all sorts of defense mechanisms to avoid experiencing pain, such as a hard emotional skin that enables them to navigate the world without being hurt by it. Otherwise, how could they not care about the millions of people who are dying from malnutrition and preventable diseases, or the trillions of animals that are being needlessly killed year after year?

We’re living in a pain-denying culture. In this culture, pain is considered as something terribly bad that we need to avoid encountering. So we try to escape from it in all sorts of ways, such as by numbing our minds with intoxicants or by distracting ourselves with entertainment. Pain, we believe, is our worst enemy, hence we do anything we can to hide from it. This way, however, we don’t give ourselves the chance to look into our pain, understand what’s causing it and effectively deal with it. Rather, we push it deep into our unconscious where it resides unresolved.

In reality, pain isn’t our enemy. Rather, it’s our friend, and, in fact, a great one. If you take some time to think about it, pain is there for a very important reason: To show us that something is wrong with the way we live, and to urge us to make change in order to correct that wrongness.

Let me give a simple example to illustrate what I mean. If you place your hands in fire, you’ll instantly feel pain. That pain is there to tell you that you’re in danger, and that unless you do something about it (i.e. remove your hands from the fire), you’ll burn yourself. Of course, emotional pain is more complicated and subtler to understand, but the same core logic can be extended to it.

Seen this way, pain is a wake up call. But when we have been traumatized again and again since the early days of our lives, we feel so hurt that don’t want to do anything with pain anymore. Hence, we try to rationalize, forget or just plain deny it. This is why so many of us have become so insensitive to the suffering of the planet. But unless we acknowledge and befriend pain, how can we empathize with the world? And unless we empathize with it, how can we do something to heal it?

The Earth is in great pain. Billions of people don’t have enough food to eat. Hundreds of millions of animals are killed every day. Rainforests are being clear-cut. Mountains are being strip-mined. The soil is degraded and eroded. Glaciers are melting. The oceans and the air are heavily polluted. Coral reefs are bleached. And so on and so forth. But, again, most of us willingly turn our attention away from all these important issues. And because we’ve been looking away for so long, we feel disconnected with the world around us.

To deal with the social and ecological crises ahead of us, we first and foremost need to reconnect with the world. This, however, requires that we pay attention to it — and hence to the suffering that it’s going through. By doing so, we’re bound to experience tremendous grief, due to all the life and beauty that has been lost. Yet grief can remind us of our interconnectedness and interdependence with the rest of life. It can help us to expand our sense of self and to realize that we’re a part of the world, not apart from it (and hence that when we destroy it, we’re in essence destroying ourselves). Then, what the great biologist E. O. Wilson called biophilia will be awakened within us — that is, our inherent affinity for all life on Earth and our deep-rooted desire to intimately interact with and protect it.