The origin story of Buddhism describes a young prince, Siddhartha, raised by parents who attempted to shield him from the world’s pain. When he was old enough to see the pain for himself, he went ballistic, running away to the forest, furiously determined to solve this terrible puzzle. I had a similar experience.
Back in the fifties when I grew up, little was publicly discussed about the Holocaust, so I can’t blame my parents for never having mentioned it. Nor did my parents share whatever hardships they might have experienced during the Great Depression or World War II. Instead, I learned life lessons from television shows like Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best. They convinced me life was going to work out perfectly.
So by the time I left for college, I already had everything figured out. I was a smart, well-read young man. Surely, I had all the tools I’d need.
But then, the threat of the draft brought the Vietnam war into my nightmares. I couldn’t get the screams out of my head. I had not anticipated that the pain of the world could cross into my safe protected life and affect me so personally. Once in that vulnerable state, I became obsessed by the cruelty of slavery, world hunger and other miseries of the human condition.
Like Siddhartha, I felt overwhelmed. Unlike him, I decided it was my job to fix the world. I became flooded with rage, freaking out with millions of my peers. But just as military force did not convert the Vietnamese to democracy, my fury against the government did nothing to stop the bombing. Once I realized the futility of rage, that’s when I ran away, not to the jungle. I ended up living in a garage in Berkeley, one step away from being homeless, starving myself and legally blind.
One day, I looked around and some small glint of light shone through, enabling me to see that if I didn’t find a new approach, I was going to die. In that state of helpless confusion, I discovered ideas of Eastern philosophy. These thought systems allowed me to reconcile the light and the dark of human experience. I got it. Even when life sucks, you have to live and strive toward love and compassion.
By then I’d wrecked my prospects, but I now felt motivated to reassemble what I’d lost. My first job, in addition to finding a job, was to figure out how to relate to people. Having spent most of my early life shielding myself against human connection, this was new territory for me. To make progress in this direction, I turned to my fascination with science, not the math and physics variety but psychology’s insights into mental health.
During the early stages of my long journey to repair my relationship to the world, I had to withdraw my attention from other people’s suffering. I knew it was out there, but I didn’t have the strength to feel it.
I spent twenty-five years on this long journey to repair my ability to live in a world that included both joy and suffering. Finally, as I crossed the threshold into the third quarter of my life, I discovered a way back to my whole heart. Reading memoirs allowed me to see suffering without being consumed by it.
Memoirs cover an enormous range of experiences. There was the middle-age British couple who bought a fixer-upper in Spain. In Victoria Twead’s memoir, Chickens, Mules and Two Old Fools, their worst pain was a botched home repair. But memoirs also extended to the most painful aspects of human experience. In Life Touches Life by Lorraine Ash, I allowed myself to know a mother’s agony over the death of a child. In Crazy Love by Leslie Morgan Steiner I felt a young woman’s new husband, threatening her life during violent psychotic breaks. In Girls Like Us by Rachel Lloyd I accompanied a young woman who fell into a life of sex trafficking. In Catfish and Mandala by Andrew X. Pham I experienced the family’s hardship escaping the terrors of post-war Vietnam. And in several memoirs about living through the Holocaust, I experienced the sensation that I’d woken up in hell.
This growing repertoire of memoirs varied enormously in the gravity of their author’s circumstance. Yet they all offer a consistent theme. Every one of them represents the courage and creative effort of someone trying to translate their hopes, failures, and efforts into the shape of a story. And everyone fulfills the promise of the genre: that by the end of the memoir, the author would find some wisdom, strength, insight, to help make sense of all that had taken place.
I still long to live in a kinder world. But instead of attempting to create that world through rage, I’ve turned to memoirs. Reading them, teaching them, and encouraging them offers a way to navigate the pain, not to solve it, but to face it and do what we can to learn from it and grow.
And as we memoir people face the pain within ourselves and allow ourselves to openly witness the worst that life has to offer, we are also opening ourselves up to the best. Our growing compassion for each other will provide the essential ingredient for the world we are working to create.
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