Ownership of the Moment
Do I own this moment or not? Every moment of our existence, we answer this question for ourselves.
What do I mean by owning a moment? When ones owns a moment, they choose to respond to the pain in that moment by acting in a direction that makes that pain meaningful. To own the moment is to see the painful element residing in your experience, realize why that pain has to be there, and to then act in such a way that integrates that pain into the fabric of the personality. One must use the pain that they feel as the fuel by which they blaze a path forward.
An insight I had lately was that “no pleasure without pain” isn’t necessarily a call to charge blindly into the fray of hardship. This statement can be viewed as a call to see and describe how our life is already painful, and to then claim that pain as our own—both to feel and to act upon. Supposing that 1) pain is a fuel to our fire and 2) that life is suffering, then success lies merely in looking our pain in the eye!
There are many ways that we deflect ownership of our pain. We blame, we self-deceive, we medicate, etc. We create elaborate narratives and strategies to confirm to ourselves that our pain is not ours. Why? Perhaps because feeling through the pain; in other words, grieving, is viewed as giving up or as failure. But when we accept that yes, in fact, this is our sorrow to lament and not anyone else’s, a release occurs. We forgive the world and those around us. By feeling our pain, we are able to digest its lessons and poop out the rest.
This essay is an example of what I’m talking about. Why did I write it? Well, this afternoon I was consumed by a relentless internal conflict that drained my energy and sapped my will. It was only when I realized that I’d reached the edge of my sanity that I realized something: painful as it was, the internal conflict was MY experience to be had! Realizing this made me feel strong—3.5 billion years of evolution led to this very moment. And now I had moved past it. That’s when I pulled out my laptop and started writing.
“Never enough” is a blessing, our greatest strength as a species. It is an ever-flowing source of internal tension that forces us to wrestle with ourselves, and whether what we’re doing is truly the best use of our time. There is always more pain to be integrated, and we will always end up better off for doing so. This stance gives us the agency to take full ownership over the pain in our lives and to sculpt it into something amazing.