Hampton Roads Publishing Company Blog

People often ask why life is so hard. They ask it with special force once they have gotten to the point of realizing that we do indeed co-create our lives. “If we have as much power to shape our lives as is claimed,” people sometimes ask, “why do our lives have so much pain, so many troubles, so much frustration?”

A few months ago, I was given an answer that satisfies me. Perhaps it will you, as well.

Over the past year, I have been in communication with departed spirits - the shades of the dead, as people used to say. That’s another story for another time. For now, either take it for granted, or pretend, that you are hearing the shade of Ernest Hemingway,

talking of what happened to him after he killed himself.

——

“When I left the body - when I blew myself out of that situation - I knew what I was doing, and why. I wasn’t emotionally distraught, I wasn’t out of my mind, and I wasn’t even depressed - once I’d figured out how to get out. So when I got over to this side - as you always put it - I knew where and who I was and how I’d gotten here. I was fine, despite what you’ve heard about suicides. The bad effects of suicide have a lot more to do with attitudes than with a given act.

“I went back to being in my mid-thirties. I was happy then. I’d taken my lumps and I’d already left Hadley, which was a stupid thing to do but there you are, and I was in the prime of life. I was healthy, able, clear-sighted and I could do about anything I ever had a reasonable chance to do. I could shoot, I could fish, I could ride, I could write. I saw beauty everywhere and I loved being alive! It was people and their actions and emotions that were hard, and here that isn’t a problem.

“As you are beginning to discover, loneliness is not a factor here, either. We’re all connected. So you’re as alone as you wish and as connected as you wish. It’s perfect! If you want to go fishing, it’s as real as going fishing on earth - especially to the degree that you release control.”

I think I know what you mean, but -

“Not much fun fishing if every time you throw the line you know you are going to catch a fish, and even less fun if you know that every one is going to be prize category. So - release control and it’s just like earth. You are deliberately renouncing your ability to create what you want, you see, or maybe I should say you are creating a range of results and renouncing timing and control over which one manifests and where and when and how often. Maybe there’ll be days you don’t catch anything. You might think that would spoil it, but it doesn’t - it enhances it when you do catch something. Just like in your dimensions.

“Well, just as you do that with fishing, you do it with relationships. What’s the point in having a perfect romance, day after day, with a predictably adorable other person who adores you too? You’d get sugar diabetes of the emotions! So you relinquish control and you let people come to you sometimes - as you did. As Hadley does. As my children still do.”

——

Friends, without asking you to believe that I was really talking to Hemingway’s shade, I maintain that this is the best explanation I have ever heard as to why - we being creators of our lives - life is hard. Life is hard because it serves us to have it unpredictable.

Kind of takes the victim-hood out of things, doesn’t it?