It started when I spoke up. I disagreed when they said the phrase “God doesn’t give you more than you can handle” is untrue.
My reference point for this is my spiritual understanding, built over many years of inner work and conversations with higher consciousness, as well as my experience. What I feel to be true is that everything is just experience, and whether it is random or planned out before incarnation doesn’t really matter…what does matter in our human life is what we do with our experience. We can either be in pain about it or not, suffer from it or not. We can use it as the compost to grow from or we can let it be the shit that continues to pile up on our hapless, helpless selves. I have chosen to grow from my experiences, and to use the wisdom that I have garnered as I have walked through the darkness, calling broken shards of myself back to me, to help other people.
Some have not awakened the tools within themselves to be able to walk through the darkness, through their own choices. Some have so much pain in their life that they choose to exit the earthly plane. But is it because their life was more than they could handle? Were they unable to reach inside, grit their teeth, and tie a knot and hold on? Did they not have the same capacity for joy and purpose and potential that I have? Do they not possess the innate connection to their ever-present and ever-knowing soul and spirit and divinity that I do? What is the difference between folks who can handle what’s given to them and those who can’t?
I don’t believe there is an essential difference. When viewed from a very large perspective, even suicide is just another choice, just another experience. From that perspective, anything we encounter, whether we judge it as painful or not, is still just experience.
But from a very human perspective, one that lives in this world and is invested in things going well, suicide seems such a horrid waste of life. It is so sad to think about a fellow human being in so much anguish….my compassion wants to reach out and hold them in my arms, and make it all better. “Don’t you know how precious you are? Don’t you know what a gift it is to be alive?” Having flirted with the edge of death myself a few times, I can say that what drives a person to consider taking their own life is definitely feeling there is too much pain to deal with. It is a seeking of peace, I think.
But I didn’t take my own life. What was it in me that made that choice, in comparison to others that DO go that final step to end their physical existence? I certainly was given plenty of awful stuff to deal with. Enough to make any sensible person want to make a hasty exit. Apparently, I even tried to die as a baby, getting a serious infection a few days after birth at the site of my connection to my mother. But the universe wasn’t having it; I stuck around.
But I am not special or different….I am just another human being like the rest of us. Why am I here, when others are not?
Is it fate when someone successfully commits suicide in response to their pain? Was there something larger than me that prevented me from dying when I could have several times, and then prevented me from taking action later to end my life by my own hand? Or was it something in me that won’t let go of fighting…..won’t let go of surviving whatever gets thrown at me….is determined to make the most of this brief sojourn on earth, no matter how painful it might get?
In the moments after something painful inevitably occurs in our lives, why do some of us choose to look for the lessons and grow from it, while others experience it as yet another wave that takes them further from shore? In that moment of choice to live or to die, what is it that makes the difference? And are we ever “given more than we can handle”?
