“The question isn’t whether or not you will suffer. You will suffer. At issue is the meaning of suffering, or the yield.”
Louise Gluck said those words during a baccalaureate address at Williams College. She died yesterday at the age of 80. She was a Noble Prize winning poet and a favorite of mine whose collected poems I once read steadily for three months.
Explaining her point further Gluck added, “To teach myself hope, I began, thirty years ago, to chart periods of silence in the same way that I dated poems. And I have repeatedly seen long silence end in speech. Moreover, the speech, the writing that begins after such a siege, differs always from what went before, and in ways I couldn’t through act of will accomplish.”
Although it is nearly impossible to conceive of when you are inside a season of suffering in your life, I can attest that suffering does always produce a “yield.” For Gluck that meant a long silence in her life always ended in speech. And that speech – the eyes through which she observed life, her new poems – was wiser, more empathetic, and insightful. This was her “yield.”
In the suffering you have experienced, or with those you love, have you seen a version of such a yield? As Gluck points out, we all will suffer at one time in our life, the question is will we notice what this season brings forth when that time ends?
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