Credit: movida.cyberfleming.com
By Wes Annac, Culture of Awareness
I wrote the following for the one hundred and sixty-fifth issue of The Culture of Awareness Weekly Newsletter, a paid weekly newsletter I offer for $11.11 a month.
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When I look around, I can’t help but see that everyone’s hurting. Everyone’s struggling to get by in this often cold and heartless world, and as much as we all try to put on a happy face for the people around us, we still feel the need to communicate our struggles in hopes that someone will hear us and show us some compassion.
Nobody’s exempt from the pain and heartache that come with living in this world, and heartache is here in abundance. As much as I hate to say it, it doesn’t seem like the pain is going away any time soon and the best thing we can do is try to be there for the people who are hurting even more than us. We’re all hurting, but some people’s struggles are worse than ours and they need compassion as much as we do, if not more.
I wish I could offer a remedy for the world’s pain, and as a spiritual writer with an interest in helping humanity evolve, it hurts deeply to not be able to help people see the light at the end of the tunnel. Sometimes, that light is all I can see because it’s all I allow myself to see. If it weren’t, I might not be able to keep doing the things I’m doing. I might not be so enthusiastic about working for the light, and I definitely wouldn’t be inspired enough to go to all this effort to write every day.
I want more than anything to help the world wake up from this endless struggle and see that there’s so much love here, but most of the world is still cut off from this love, along with the higher realms that contain it in abundance which are nonetheless merging with this reality. I wish I could show people that while life on earth is undoubtedly heartbreaking, pain and heartbreak aren’t the only things this life has for us.
If we try, we can access incredible states of consciousness that remind us that life doesn’t have to be so painful. The purpose of life is for us to (a not take it so seriously, (b enjoy it because we don’t take it so seriously, and (c make the climb back to God and our higher consciousness. While life on earth has been hijacked by people who want to make us work like financial slaves just to get by, which automatically takes away most of its joy, this isn’t its intention.
We aren’t here to struggle and fight with each other. We aren’t here to have so many problems with each other that we can hardly get together without some kind of drama being involved. We aren’t here to be rooted in all of these hateful qualities that are breaking people’s hearts, and we’re caught up in an intricate and convincing illusion that, little do we know, is slowly draining our love and starving us of the light and joy we require.
Somehow, you and I need to restore love in the hearts of humanity. I don’t know how we can do it beyond using love as a tool for personal and planetary transformation, which is easier said than done, but I do know that the world needs us.
Even if people don’t realize or communicate it at the surface, they need our love and compassion. They need someone to listen to their pain and their struggles, and it helps more than we think to lend an ear. We have to become the loving, compassionate force we know is missing from this world, but we can’t do too much in this area because we don’t want it to take too much of a toll on our emotional and spiritual wellbeing.
One of the ways this work takes a toll is when the people we want to help start to make us subconsciously think that our goals, our work and our general outlook on life are too naïve.
Society wants us to think we’re naïve for being so passionate about love and spirituality or thinking we can actually change the world, and maybe we are. Maybe the world needs people who are willing to stick their necks out and be naïve enough to actually make a difference, because the rest of society isn’t about to try.
I’ve had my fair share of emotional blows throughout all of this, and I’m sure I’ll continue to have them. Being in this world and mingling with people whose love, positivity and spiritual awareness seem nonexistent has taken its toll on me, and I often feel like I’m more apart of other people’s darker realities than they are my reality, which is mainly driven by love, spiritual awareness and compassion to the point of self-martyrdom.
I feel forced to go along with what other people say and think simply because I feel so much compassion for them that I don’t want to force my beliefs, my knowledge or my viewpoints onto them, and this leaves me feeling like I don’t have any positive spiritual ground to stand on. Again, it’s all a part of the mission, but it doesn’t make the struggle any easier.
The optimism I approached this work with as an awakening teen is being replaced with the understanding that this is a dark world and most of its people are in unimaginable pain, but despite this, I continue to devote myself to love.
In fact, this ‘new’ understanding of life leads me to embrace love more, because it’s the obvious solution to all of these seemingly unsolvable problems. It’s also what causes us to hurt so much for the people around us who struggle, and my empathy has led to inescapable sadness on more than one occasion.
This mission has caused me a lot of emotional pain lately, and most of it comes from the fact that everyone around me (and again, the world as a whole) is hurting. If they aren’t mad about whatever little things life makes them deal with, they’re in massive pain over the things life has taken from them. Most of them just seem stuck in a negative loop, and no matter how much love I give, they suck it up and convert it right back into the anger and sadness I’d like to help them transcend.
When you realize you can only do so much, you can give yourself permission to back off a little for your own sake. We’re here to uplift people, but we don’t always have to let their pain or negativity drain our love. I think the best way to help the world is with some kind of work (writing, music, etc.) that reaches the people it’s meant to reach, and the people around us will find it if they want. It either will or won’t help them, and we can’t concern ourselves with helping them if they don’t really want our help.
I sincerely want to help the world wake up, rediscover true love and remember that their problems don’t have to be so overwhelming, but when it comes down do it, I can only help so much. At a certain point, I have to walk away, detach from the situation(s) and return to my easel, which happens to be Microsoft Word and/or a piece of notebook paper, for the real work.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t be there for the people who need us, but we have to keep our emotional and spiritual health in mind as we do. This world is downright vitriolic, and I regret that my positive perspective is being slowly replaced by this understanding. It’s based on the things I’ve witnessed and been a part of lately, but if there’s anything good to say about pain or sadness, is that they’re beautiful.
Happiness is beautiful in its own way, but sadness is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever felt and experienced in others. I don’t know how to explain it, but sadness carries its own resonance that, if you can appreciate without being caught up in, you’ll realize is extremely heartwarming. Sadness is like an inverted form of love that contains so much raw emotion that it can’t help but affect you deeply, and it makes us aware of our love.
We wouldn’t be so sad if we didn’t have so much love, and perhaps this is why it’s so beautiful. It illuminates our love and reminds us that it’s there, and it’s been responsible for some amazing creative work throughout history. Despite all of this, I want to help the world get away from its endless sadness by showing the way back to true love, and since pain and sadness are shades of love, maybe humanity is closer to it than we realize.
Let’s keep going and remember to be there for people when they need us, but let’s also remember not to sacrifice our emotional wellbeing in the process. Some sacrifices are inevitable, but we don’t want to lose our openhearted perspective the world or our knowledge of the vibrant states of consciousness that are available in abundance if we can open up.