The Impeded Stream Sings: Embracing Sacrifice & Growth

Woody Allen had a cheeky line. “You have two choices in life, you can be single and be miserable or get married and wish you were dead.”
 
Beneath the grimness of the joke is a truth about every choice we make involving some kind of inescapable pain or loss. We easily cling to the fantasy that there’s a choice that can bypass disappointment, but the deeper truth is that no matter which path we choose we have to  choose what kind of loss and  disappointment to live with.
 
There’s an African proverb that frames this inevitable limitation in the context of  our mortality as human beings. It says: '"If we go forward, we die; if we go backward, we die. So let's go forward and die." Every big or difficult choice is a kind of death—it asks us to let go of something we don’t want to let go of. When faced with difficult decisions, we’re all tempted to search for a path forward without a tradeoff, a way free of loss. We have deep hard-wiring to avoid pain.
 
Commitment and Sacrifice
 
When we think about the places where we get stuck, or the pain points where we struggle, there's often this experience of "I don't like my choices," or, "I don't like either of these two choices." These moments of being between a rock and a hard place can feel intolerable and claustrophobic--they can haunt us or feel like they're going to destroy us.
 
They might ask us to grow in any number of ways, but generally speaking there are two skills that are part of the craft of being a mature human being involved in these choice points: commitment and sacrifice.
 
A commitment is a stronger, deeper, longer-term yes to someone or something or some place that asks us to sacrifice all the other things we won’t be able to have in order to stay with that one person or one place or one thing.
 
Big life decisions like committing to a long-term relationship, ending a relationship, starting a new job, or deciding to move, or to have a child, force us to confront the losses inherent in every choice. We go one way, and in doing so we don’t get to experience what was down the other path—or even know for sure what we might be missing.
 
This is the essence of a dilemma –a difficult choice has to be made between two or more alternatives, either of which asks us to face our fears, and to grow in challenging ways.
 
I’ll give a few examples to illustrate : A couple wants to decide if they are moving forward into the future together as life partners, but they have dramatically different feelings about becoming parents. One is much more drawn to it, the other has strong reservations. In order to choose each other, or not choose each other, choose parenthood or not choose parenthood, they have to journey through this difference, their inner conflicts about each choice. No matter what decision they make, they will have to face uncertainty and sacrifice.
 
Someone gets a once in a lifetime job opportunity that would require them to relocate. The move would take them away from a community of friends and family whom they love and who sustains them. Either road presents tremendous rewards and heartbreaking losses. There’s no detour around the hard stuff--no simple gratification without sacrifice.
 
There’s no way around these life choices being difficult. But there is a way that having a meaningful context in which to hold them makes the process easier. Understanding, accepting, and even valuing how we are asked to let go of some paths in the process of choosing others is essential. This is the principle of sacrifice.
 
Sacrifice

Sacrifice is loss with purpose. A sacrifice is a choice to let go of one thing to stay connected to something that is more important--a deeper value, purpose, or love. Sacrifice is the act of choosing—with all its blessings and hardships-- made sacred, which is to say made more beautiful or meaningful in some way. When our choices are made within a larger story that has some coherence, a shape that makes sense to us, our losses are ennobled and our suffering is given a worthwhile direction.
 
This is why regarding transformation and growth as a sacred process can make all the difference between feeling like we are the victims of chaos, or feeling like we are the hero in a story that contains dignity and beauty.
 
What are some of the containers, structures, and forms that help people face suffering and transformation as a sacred process?
 
Traditional religion. Ideas of sacrifice of different kinds are woven through most religious traditions to give people a sense of purpose and meaning as they orient to life, and especially to suffering. Jesus dying on the cross, the Buddha leaving his palatial home to embark on an inner journey that called him, or the archetype of selfless service exemplified by Mother Theresa are a few examples.
 
Any clear system of values serves the same purpose. When people get more clear on what’s important to them, it helps them make sense of the sacrifices inherent in growing.
 
A mythological sensibility. This means connecting to one’s life as a story. Stories have struggle, and they have chaos, but they have some organizing aesthetic quality that imbues the hardship with meaning and purpose.
 
Community and Ritual. Rituals are experiences that create an external expression of the tensions, emotions, and invisible transformations we undergo internally. Importantly they include the community, so that our individual, internal transformation is witnessed and affirmed by the collective—giving it value, dignity, and context within community it otherwise might not have.
 
Rites of passage is an enactment of this truth—we deliberately go through something that is extremely challenging and asks us to surrender to what we are leaving behind in order to enter into a new phase of life, a new form of being. The milestones within a human lifespan are punctuated by rites of passage. Physical birth, the enormous changes throughout childhood, the particular transition of adolescence between childhood and adulthood, the identity shifts that come with middle life such as becoming a parent or living through changes in vocation or relationships, and of course the enormous transitions of elderhood and death which bring with them both suffering and unique blessings.
 
Here is how the poet David Whyte describes the choice we have about how we hold and make sense of our experiences of loss:
 
“The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our vulnerability, how we become larger and more courageous and more compassionate through our intimacy with disappearance, our choice is to inhabit vulnerability as generous citizens of loss, robustly and fully, or conversely, as misers and complainers, reluctant and fearful, always at the gates of existence, but never bravely and completely attempting to enter, never wanting to risk ourselves, never walking fully through the door.” (From: Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words)
 
In closing, here is a simple practice you might try the next time you’re find yourself “between two fires” in a decision you have to make:
 
Notice how in making decisions, we often ask ourselves the questions: “What is the right decision? Or what is the best decision? Try shifting the questions you ask to: “Which sacrifices do I choose to make here, and why? What values or principles make the sacrifices I choose to make meaningful or beautiful?
 
And finally, a poem by Wendell Berry:

Our Work

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.