Grieving is Essential

Growing a Central Pain Processing Unit

Several recent sessions at the virtual conference I am attending — Limicon 2024 — touched on the issue of building trust between people. What creates the conditions that allows each of us to willingly commit some actual resources to a shared project? There seems to be general consensus among participants that something needs to be done. And that it needs to be done together — if not by everyone all at once, then at least in smaller groups that coordinate in some fashion. How can that happen? There are so many worthy ideas to pursue. And beyond the general consensus around the need for action, it would require consensus on what precisely that action ought to be, and that there is trust between all the actors.

To me, this looks like a pretty difficult problem to tackle. My own preferences might be to implement one particular strategy for building this consensus. And already there could be tremendous disagreement between people: how to build that consensus... There is always this nagging question... What if...? What if somehow, a bit into the process, I find that I am being asked to do something that I do not agree with? How do I avoid getting mixed up in something that my entire being rejects as a bad idea? In other words, how will the other people respond to my signals of hurt and pain?

It is probably my personal biases that led me to these questions. Others may already disagree that those are (the most) important ones at all. Funny enough, I believe that — in some sense — this is just another way of saying the same thing, though: my preferences may simply not be what feels relevant or even good for others. And then what? How am I, or are they, supposed to communicate this in a way that tells me and others that it is safe to continue working together?

I have found two important pieces that I would like to bring together in a tentative answer. The first piece is that, in my own, personal experience, I find myself willing to submit under the direction of others if (and pretty much only if) I am confident that they will experience my pain as inescapable — particularly insofar as I feel confident that it is caused by their choices. Whenever I act in accordance with those people's wishes, I need to feel certain that should a problem arise out of following their strategies, they will be receptive to my communicating my experience of such a problem. And I appreciate already one very hard to solve problem: how do I know —and how can others discern — whether a problem I am experiencing is, in fact, associated with someone else's strategy I am pursuing (or supposed to pursue)...? I want to name this as a problem, and appreciate that I cannot offer a solution beyond saying that these are judgment calls that requires building experience and expectations between people, and that without trusting our capacity of correctly attributing pain to causes, this seems very difficult to get a handle on...

The second piece is that whenever someone else communicates their pain to me, I find it very difficult to willingly respond to that pain if I am not in a position to actually do something about it, or if I feel that the other person has not even begun to explore options at their disposal to change the situation in order to reduce the pain and discomfort they are going through. A silly example might be a bit of a caricature: imagine that I am carrying a heavy stack of objects while approaching a closed door. On top of the stack sits a precious book belonging to a friend of mine. He sees me approaching the door, and can see that it will be difficult for me to open it while carrying the stack of objects. As I reach the door, I look at him, and he looks at me. Nothing. Since I want to open the door, I rest the stack against it, hold the weight with one hand, and use the free hand to open the door. As soon as it swings open, the book on top falls to the floor, and my friend starts shouting about how I am being irresponsible. Why did I not ask him for help? I do appreciate that, yes, I could have said something. On the other hand, I am feeling annoyed: if my friend considers his book to be so precious not to fall to the floor, why did he not help me with the door? I sense that this kind of issue is going on a lot between people. Something happens that makes someone feel a jolt of fear, anxiety, or panic with a thought of, "how could the other person do this or that?" And then the accusations start flying. If such an accusation is directed at me, and I ask myself, "could the other person have done something to make it better?" and I have a clear answer, "yes, they could have," then it is so much harder to accept the other person's signal of wanting me to change my behavior as valid.

More fundamentally, however, I see many expressions of pain as coming out of a fundamental misunderstanding. The following paragraphs feels very tricky to get right, and I appreciate that I will likely screw it up... Being alive as a human being among other human beings seems to come with a number of unescapable painful experiences. It is a bit like living in an apartment building, and all of a sudden realizing that a family with a couple of newborn toddlers have moved in next door. No matter the time, day and night, there is a chance that my peace of mind will be disturbed by some infants incessantly crying their hearts out, and there seems little I can do about it. Who are these infants?

In my experience of human beings, we are a justice seeking bunch. And whenever we experience a situation where we can make out an injustice, particularly around aspects of fairness we deeply care about, we become these toddlers for other people. We want to make a demand of our environment: you shall not have another peaceful moment until this unfairness is taken care of! Unfortunately, life is full of such unfairness. Many of these aspects — at least in my current understanding of reality — simply cannot be changed to create true justice. Instead, for the time being, we seem to have settled for an approach that seeks to amend the rules by which people play with one another. These amended rules then create other problems. And these problems then create real pains elsewhere, to which the people who then feel called to respond with signals of their own believe that there is a bit of a catch-22 at work.

What are some of these injustices? I will name only three, but the list is probably much longer, maybe endless even... Our species, like all of life, requires procreation to continue its journey. Humans appear in two forms, female and male. And this biological reality comes with different burdens, limitations, and experiences when it comes to the necessary process of procreation. For one, women carry the much greater risk to their lives and to their emotional and cognitive "free energy" for every new human being in the making. I consider this a source of inescapable injustice of sorts.

Whether we measure it by monetary success or just by how much we are willing to share our non-monetary resources with others, people are born with different kinds and amounts of talents for attracting affirmation and positive attention. No matter how much we wish that intelligence or physical beauty did not matter — whether as a consequence of genes or the parental and environmental lottery — I do not believe that we can escape the difference in positive (or negative) attention these differences create. And one such set of differences comes from the female/male reality…

Even if we could eliminate these differences, however, ultimately the length of a person's life span itself is subject to random and undeserved variation. This ranges from genetic influences, whereby only some people inherit genes predicting longevity, all the way to accidents, with some people being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Here is the crux: Feeling deeply connected to the beauty of life, how wonderful it is to breathe, to experience, to not feel hunger or thirst, to feel safe and well, and then to realize that not only is this life finite, and that I have to die, but that also an inherent injustice exists by which many other people, without any doing of their own, will not get to enjoy the same benefits and beauty feels, well, cruel. Who the heck came up with this game? We seem to be stuck in an endlessly cruel joke about existence. No matter what we do, there seems to be no way of eliminating this. No wonder people are crying... Life as a process is the overcoming of a pressure or energy gradient in order to maybe achieve some semblance of progress — at least in the next generation maybe. But at what cost for the individuals who are suffering along the way…?

An image I recently came up with goes a bit like this: humanity as a whole seems to me like someone who is slowly waking up from a dream. In the dream, the person is running away from an ever hungry predator. And while he is running, he gets scratched and bruised, and even breaks a toe or two. But since there is a predator behind him, he keeps running. Then he wakes up. And, oh my God... He finds himself actually running away from a wild beast — the dream is real! And it becomes clear: the pain really does not matter. I have to escape, I simply have to!! So, the pain needs to be ignored. At some point, he reaches a cliff and an abyss, with safety being in reach, just across the chasm. There is a thick branch growing from a tree on the other side. He takes a final jump, and he is able to get hold of the branch, and he clumsily climbs up. Once he sits there and turns around, he becomes fully aware of the situation. Slowly his breathing normalizes. And then, as experience and awareness spreads throughout the body, the accumulated pain that has been suppressed in favor of survival sets in. Why does it have to hurt so much, now that he has escaped...?

That, to me, is a bit like what humanity is going through at the moment. We have escaped a very long period of near starvation and predation by nature. The chain of generations of humans that lived over the past 10,000 years or so has gone through horrors untold. And all the while, the injustices I mentioned above had to be ignored and suppressed, in favor of survival. Through the discovery of energy storage, first in form of coal, oil, and gas, and then nuclear power, we have come to a point where our immediate survival seems no longer as much in question. And all of a sudden our direction is far less clear, and we are becoming aware of the accumulated pain we have carried, as a species, for those 10,000 (or many more) years. Our increasing connections, through social media and other channels, creates this humanity-body experience of just how bad things have been. We have slowly awoken from the kind of dream that animals likely are having, becoming painfully aware of the injustices of life. And now we are accusing one another of being the cause of these injustices, since that is how our nervous systems have been programmed.

Which brings me, at last, to the title and subtitle of this piece... The only solution I have found for my own pain around these injustices is genuine grief. If I can become aware of the root injustice: to be alive means having to die, and there is no escape. The better life is, the more I have to and will ultimately lose. As my individual life progresses, I will likely experience the loss of each friend, of each faculty, as a cruel demonstration of time being a relentless enemy, chipping away each pleasant aspect one at a time. And there is nothing I can do but to take it. But I do not have to take it alone.

This, for me, is what I can learn to do with others: I can bring whatever pain I have to their attention — not with the expectation that they will be able to take it away, but to be present with. And what I can do to help people come together is to build my own pain tolerance. Remember those couple of infants that moved in next door...? Can I learn to enjoy my life while they are crying, day and night? It is a difficult thing to learn. There will always be times when I might be tempted to fall into despair about those crying injustices again. And then it helps to know that I have people in my life I can call upon.

If the network that is forming at Limicon wants to grow together and hold, I sense we may want to develop a central pain processing unit, some mechanism that is able to receive and hold the pain the network participants experience and express. Sometimes the pain will be actionable — another network member can maybe change their behavior and reduce the pain. And sometimes the pain will simply be an expression of the fact that life, well, sucks. Not all the time, but certainly sometimes. This central pain processing unit needs to have sufficient wisdom to differentiate between the two. Otherwise the network will be caught in an endless loop of processing pain that cannot be resolved. In my view, this latter kind of pain can only be metabolized through shared grief. It will never go away completely.

Strangely, though, I feel that if I can metabolize this pain through grief, it can actually become available as fuel for action. I do want to create conditions that reduce whatever injustices exist. I do want for as many people as possible to live enjoyable and long lives. I want for people to live in conditions without environmental pollution, and without fear of predation — from nature as well as from other humans. If I can approach these problems not with despair from unprocessed pain, but with the deep understanding which comes from accepting that some injustice will remain, no matter what, but that I can always bring humanity closer to relatively more justice, then that seems a worthy goal to pursue.