Finding Purpose Amongst the Pain

Lately everyone has been asking me the same two questions, questions that I am wary to answer honestly.  For to give someone the full truth about my story seems to be to give unto them the burden of a deep, private knowledge; one that I am only now beginning to grasp.  It is a knowledge of good and evil, of fortune and loss, of ecstasy and despair.  It is seeing what you have always desired only a hands-breadth away and realising that you cannot grasp it.  It is knowing that no matter how much you feel you deserve a break, the only way to achieve the things most important in this world is to endure great suffering.  It is owning up to your own faults and failures so that you may face them fully and finally let them go.  The truth of my journey is much too vast to be condensed into simple conversation.  So I will let them make their own conclusions and rest assured in their superiority, their false sense of security.  For what I have learned is that nothing in this life is secure.  Everything is precious and frail and can be snatched away at a moment’s notice.  Nothing is a given, it must be earned one way or another.

It is said that we all have a price.  Usually this is to infer that anyone can be bought, that each of us has a point at which we will sacrifice what we know to be true and good for personal gain.  What I am coming to believe is the opposite; we all have a price we must pay in order to receive what is true and good in this world.  For some the price seems too high to pay, so they settle for a life that does not fulfill their truest nature.  They tell themselves they deserve to be discontented whether it be due to a false sense of humility or a sin from their past they believe to be unforgiveable.  Others seem to have a sense of superiority for the sacrifices they have made and feel that the world owes them something for the suffering they have endured.  They rest on their laurels, content in the belief that they have paid the price due and have no further obligation to the world.  Then there are the rest of us; those who know that no matter how exhausted we are from fighting, the battle is not over, the war is yet to be won.  We learn that the world owes us nothing, conversely it is us who owe the world.  We learn how rare and beautiful life is and how to cherish it at every moment.  Even as we collapse from fatigue, lungs burning and legs failing beneath us, we give the last of our energy over, knowing that it is never enough.

In my short life, I have endured a great deal of pain.  More than once, it has brought me to the brink of despair, nearing the point of surrender.  There have been plenty of times when I did not think I could bear to go on, that I would collapse on the spot and give in to the tempting darkness.  I thought that I could hide from the pain, numbing myself with the ordinary tasks of a mundane existence.  At one point in my life, I thought I needed to escape my surroundings with their all-too-familiar echoes of past abuses.  I thought that if I could only get away from the streets of my past that I could finally claim my prize.  I began to grasp the truth that not only is it my past that shapes me, but that the painful bits are the times when I learn the most about myself and my place in the world around me.  It is because of these experiences that I am the person I have become.

What I did not understand is that there may never be a day when the pain ends.  It is not something that I can escape.  It is not over; it is never over.  The pain will continue, and it will be though sheer determination that I will continue on.  My path is to walk through the fires of hell and blaze a trail of love and compassion for others to follow.  For me, there will be no peace until all are peaceful.  For me, there will be no freedom as long as others are oppressed.  For me, the battle is not over until all have laid down their weaponry and come together as one.  I will find solace where I may, but I will never stop fighting.