Rachel Naomi Remen

The silence in the giant redwood forest near my house draws me...At eight in the morning, the great trees stand rooted in a silence so absolute that one's inmost self comes to rest. An aged silence. Some mornings I sleep through two alarms and awaken only after the first buses have arrived. I go anyway. There are hundreds of people in the woods before me. People speaking French, German, Spanish; people marveling to each other and calling to their children in Japanese, Swedish, Russian, and some languages I do not know. And children shrieking in the universal language of childhood. But the silence is always there, unchanged. It is as impervious to these passing sounds as the trees themselves.

Suffering shapes the life force, sometimes into anger, sometimes into blame and self-pity. Eventually it may show us the wisdom of embracing and loving life.

My father was the son of immigrants. He had worked since childhood and held two jobs most of his adult life. In the evenings, he would often fall asleep in his chair, his feet in a basin of warm water, too exhausted to talk. Always he had worked for other people, on their terms, for their goals...All throughout my childhood, there was a game my father and I would play. He would talk about his house, the house he would someday own...I was almost twenty when he and Mom bought a little place on Long Island and he retired. For a while, his dream seemed complete.

'Are you enjoying yourselves?' I asked [when I'd visit]. 'Well,' Mom said, 'your father is afraid that someone will break in and take away everything we've worked for. He's still working because he wants to put in an alarm system.' My heart sank. I asked how much it would cost. My mother evaded me and said they would have it in just a little while. Months later, my father continued to look weary. Concerned, I asked when they would be taking their vacation. My father shook his head. 'Not this year — we can't leave the house empty.' I suggested a house sitter. My father was horrified. 'Oh no,' he told me. 'You know how people are. Even your friends never take care of your things the way they would take care of their own.' They never took another vacation.

In the end, my parents rarely left the house together, not even to go to the movies. There could be a fire or some other sort of vague and unnamed disaster. And my father worked odd jobs until he died. The house turned out to have far greater control over him than any of his former employers ever had.

If we fear loss enough, in the end the things we possess will come to possess us.

Perhaps we are no longer a kind people. More and more, we seem to have become numb to the suffering of others and ashamed of our own suffering. Yet suffering is one of the universal conditions of being alive. We all suffer. We have become terribly vulnerable, not because we suffer but because we have separated ourselves from each other.

Sometimes when I ask people to tell me their story they tell me about their achievements, what they have acquired or built over a lifetime. So many of us do not know our own story. A story about who we are, not what we have done. About what we have faced to build what we have built, what we have drawn upon and risked to do it, what we have felt, thought, feared, and discovered through the events of our lives. The real story that belongs to us alone.

": Whether we are aware of it or not, we will refine the quality of our humanity throughout the course of our lives. More and more, people seek spiritual techniques to help them do this. But joy and suffering will do this for you, too. Every lifetime offers countless opportunities to become more whole.
Life offers its wisdom generously. Everything teaches. Not everyone learns. Life asks of us the same thing we have been asked in every class: "Stay awake." "Pay attention." But paying attention is no simple matter. It requires us not to be distracted by expectations, past experiences, labels, and masks. It asks that we not jump to early conclusions and that we remain open to surprise. Wisdom comes most easily to those who have the courage to embrace life without judgment and are willing to not know, sometimes for a long time. It requires us to be more fully and simply alive than we have been taught to be. It may require us to suffer. But ultimately we will be more than we were when we began."

"As a physician, I was trained to deal with uncertainty as aggressively as I dealt with disease itself. The unknown was the enemy. Within this worldview, having a question feels like an emergency; it means that something is out of control and needs to be made known as rapidly, efficiently, and cost-effectively as possible. But death has taken me to the edge of certainty, to the place of questions.

After years of trading mystery for mastery, it was hard and even frightening to stop offering myself reasonable explanations for some of the things that I observed and that others told me, and simply take them as they are. "I don't know" had long been a statement of shame, of personal and professional failing. In all of my training I do not recall hearing it said aloud even once.

But as I listened to more and more people with life-threatening illnesses tell their stories, not knowing simply became a matter of integrity. Things happened. And the explanations I offered myself became increasingly hollow, like a child whistling in the dark. The truth was that very often I didn't know and couldn't explain, and finally, weighed down by the many, many instances of the mysterious which are such an integral part of illness and healing, I surrendered. It was a moment of awakening.

For the first time, I became curious about the things I had been unwilling to see before, more sensitive to inconsistencies I had glibly explained or successfully ignored, more willing to ask people questions and draw them out about stories I would have otherwise dismissed. What I have found in the end was that the life I had defended as a doctor as precious was also Holy.

I no longer feel that life is ordinary. Everyday life is filled with mystery. The things we know are only a small part of the things we cannot know but can only glimpse. Yet even the smallest of glimpses can sustain us.

Mystery seems to have the power to comfort, to offer hope, and to lend meaning in times of loss and pain. In surpr

Most of us lead far more meaningful lives than we know. Often finding meaning is not about doing things differently; it is about seeing familiar things in new ways.

The stories we can tell each other have no beginning and ending.

Most of the things that give life its depth, meaning, and value are impervious to science.

"Human being" is more a verb than a noun. Each of us is unfinished, a work in progress. Perhaps it would be most accurate to add the word "yet" to all our assessments of ourselves and each other . . . If life is process, all judgments are provisional, we can't judge something until it is finished. No one has won or lost until the race is over . . .

In our instinctive attachments, our fear of change, and our wish for certainty and permanence, we may undercut the impermanence which is our greatest strength, our most fundamental identity. Without impermanence, there is no process. The nature of life is change. All hope is based on process . . .

It is taken me somewhat longer to recognize that a diagnosis is simply another form of judgment. Naming a disease has limited usefulness. It does not capture life or even reflect it accurately. Illness, on the other hand, is a process, like life is.

Much in the concept of diagnosis and cure is about fixing, and the narrow-bore focus on fixing people's problems can lead to denial of the power of their process. Years ago, I took full credit when people became well; their recovery was testimony to my skill and knowledge as a physician. I never recognized that without their biological, emotional, and spiritual process which could respond to my interventions, nothing could have changed at all. All the time I thought I was repairing, I was collaborating.

While an impulse toward wholeness is natural and exists in everyone, each of us heals in our own way. Some people heal because they have work to do. Others heal because they have been released from their work and the pressures and expectations that others place on them. Some people need music, others need silence, some need people around them, others heal alone. Many different things can activate and strengthen the life force in us. For each of us there are conditions of healing that are as unique as a fingerprint. Sometimes people ask me what I do in my sessions with patients. Often I just remind people of the possibility of healing and study their own way of dealing with them.

A human life has seasons much as the earth has seasons, each time with its own particular beauty and power. And gift. By focusing on springtime and summer, we have turned the natural process of life into a process of loss rather than a process of celebration and appreciation. Life is neither linear nor is it stagnant. It is movement from mystery to mystery. Just as a year includes autumn and winter, life includes death, not as an opposite but as an integral part of the way life is made.

The denial of death is the most common way we all edit life. Despite the power of technology to reveal to us the nature of this world, death remains the ultimate unknown, impervious to the prodding finger of science. We might well ask if anything which cannot be addressed in scientific terms is really worthy of our attention. Yet most of the things that give life its depth, meaning, and value are impervious to science.

The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention…. A loving silence often has far more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words.

The marks life leaves on everything it touches transform perfection into wholeness. Older, wiser cultures choose to claim this wholeness in the things that they create. In Japan, Zen gardeners purposefully leave a fat dandelion in the midst of the exquisite, ritually precise patterns of the meditation garden. In Iran, even the most skilled of rug weavers includes an intentional error, the “Persian Flaw,” in the magnificence of a Tabriz or Qashqai carpet…and Native Americans wove a broken bead, the “spirit bead,” into every beaded masterpiece. Nothing that has a soul is perfect. When life weaves a spirit bead into your very fabric, you may stumble upon a wholeness greater than you had dreamed possible before.