When I was 19 years old, I volunteered in a shelter run by the Missionaries of Charity in India. Crowded along the banks of the Ganges, this Home for the Dying Destitute housed dozens of residents in the crumbling palace of some maharaja long forgotten. There I met Ajeet.
Ajeet had once been a poor but promising student at university. Eventually he worked in the civil service where he imagined a bright future for himself. Then tuberculosis struck. He lost his job and a long series of unfavorable events left him begging on the streets. When I met this cheerful and resolute man, the nuns had tended him for several months, helping him to regain some of his strength.
He became an unofficial supervisor of the daily tasks I was set to. One day I commented on his obvious gratitude for these women who had given him a home and a measure of dignity. He acknowledged his thankfulness, then added: “But love is the thing that saves us.”
I’ve never forgotten Ajeet but I’ve often forgotten what he taught me that day. Not many of us reading this will face the hardships he did, but all of us will experience some adversity in our lives. Only a single moment stands between us and devastating heartbreak, disability, or death.
True adversity, I’m discovering, teaches me that life is precious and that each day could be my last. It reminds me that how I spend my time matters. It demands more discipline, courage, and strength of character than I think I’m capable of. Eventually hard times may even offer an advantage to those of us who survive them: the gift of a certain steadiness in response to life’s inevitable ups and downs.
The word adversity has its roots in to turn toward, to face, or to confront. Facing our difficulties does not mean that life has to be a joyless, teeth-gritting endeavor. In fact, to hold both the beauty and suffering of our lives in an open handed, open hearted way is rather the point. Turning toward our difficulties with curiosity rather than resistance invites us to accept our experience just as it is—pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral.
But this means we have to be willing to confront our attachment to the belief that this is not supposed to happen to me or my life should be different. Loosening the grip on our ideas about how life should be can allow us to enjoy the life we actually have. How we let these beliefs go is part of the practice in mindfulness: again and again we gently guide the mind back to here-and-now awareness.
If we let it, our own suffering can break us wide open to the suffering of others. Sometimes the heartbreak of others helps us find the cracks in our own patched together life. That’s what Ajeet’s presence did for me. And when he asserted that love is what truly saves, he was teaching me that love is the only thing that redeems our lives from self-centered purposelessness.
Ultimately it is in facing the reality of our lives that we uncover a capacity for compassionate connection that is steadier and more spacious. A deeper confidence, even lightheartedness, can emerge as we begin to accept ourselves as we are, rather than as we think we should be. In the rubble and ruins of our imperfect existence, adversity strips away our inauthenticity, and opens the gate to a life more fully lived.
