The Hands That Work on Us - How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow

Excerpted from
Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow
By Elizabeth Lesser

I settled down pretty young for a girl of my times. I met my first husband when I was nineteen, was married a few years later, and had a baby at twenty-three. Although I was a proud child of the sixties, and a card-carrying hippie, there is a chance that in my twenties I was one of the most morally minded members of the entire baby boomer generation. In 1975 my husband and I moved from California to the East Coast with our spiritual teacher and about a hundred other young people. From the outside looking in, we were just another bunch of middle-class kids going back to the land to form one of those ill-fated counterculture communes. But we had high hopes for our peaceable abode. We would be different; we would live in harmony and simplicity; we were in for a surprise.

After searching for land from North Carolina to Vermont, we settled in upstate New York, on the north side of a mountain, in a magnificent, broken-down Shaker village. A friend of a friend had inherited the property from his parents and could no longer afford the upkeep and taxes. Pooling our resources, we bought the place-the village and several hundred acres of woods and farmland-and set out to do everything for ourselves, from birthing babies to repairing buildings. What we couldn't fix, find, farm, or finagle, we figured we'd do without.

The Shaker village was a collection of ten enormous structures-all architectural wonders in various stages of ruin. Built in the late eighteenth century, the whole property-the buildings and basements, the courtyards and barns - was haunted by the ghosts of the Shakers, an austere people devoted to hard work, shared belongings, and out-of-body religious experiences. I found more of a kinship with the Shaker ghosts than with many of my contemporaries around the country who were busy climbing financial ladders and delaying marriage and parenthood, or worse, snorting cocaine and swapping partners.

Tucked away in a forgotten rural area, meditating and praying three times a day, studying up on Shaker crafts and herbal remedies, and raising my children with a gaggle of other commune babies, I regarded the emerging yuppie culture out in the "real world" with disdain. In fact, I perceived our experiment in communal living as a vote against modern culture and its destructive methods of so-called progress. Unlike the rest of the world, we would live lightly on the earth, in tune with a natural rhythm. My mother-in-law saw the whole commune thing in a different light: She accused us of "setting hygiene back fifty years."

My husband and I agreed that we would never make the undisciplined, greedy, and morally hollow choices of many of our other friends. We would never have a dishwasher, never live in suburbia, and never get divorced. We would not trade spiritual enlightenment for personal gratification. We wanted to build a better world. Later, I would be humbled by our naïve brand of arrogance. Later, I would stumble upon the path to a better world not in spiritual theories or in the rarefied heights of my idealism but in the softness of a broken heart, and in the fires of daily life.

Later came sooner than I ever would have imagined, but it still took a long time. Looking back on the fires that made me who I am today, I know now that the person who rose from the ashes of my most difficult times is far more interesting, joyful, brave, and honorable than the young woman who thought she knew what the world needed. The poet Rilke writes, In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on usm. The hands of those friendly forces quietly worked on me all during the seven years I lived on the commune, as I married, became a midwife, had my children, and studied with great heart and diligence the teachings of my spiritual mentor. The hands worked on me during unhappy times with my husband, frustrating times as a young mother, and all the time in the bewildering conflict of communal living. The friendly forces were gathering, yet I was only vaguely aware of their rumblings, caught up as I was in creating a better culture, a better life, a better inc. I believed that if I only tried hard enough, I could rise above the common sordidness and sorrow of the world. And then the forces intervened, as they always will. My untested heart was broken. What I thought was certain-my marriage-became uncertain. What I thought was beyond reproach-my teacher-showed undeniable signs of humanness. What I wanted to believe was different from the rest of the world - the commune-wasn't. Thus began my descent. On the way down, I turned and met the friendly forces, and felt the hands of transformation begin to work on me.

Certainly, I am grateful for the uncommon intensity of communal life, for the guidance of my spiritual teacher, and for the profound friendship of those with whom I shared that period of my life. I would not trade those years for anything. But had I never stumbled down the mountain of my ideals, had my ego not been humbled by loss, and my heart not broken open by pain, I would not have discovered the secret treasure that lies waiting for each one of us at the bottom of our most difficult times.

Every shift in our life comes courtesy of the friendly forces; every catastrophe can hand us exactly what we need to awaken into who we really are. It's difficult, though, when you're in the middle of a painful transition, to mine the experience for inner growth. And when your life falls apart, it's a lot easier to blame someone else, to rail against fate, or to shut down to the hopeful messages carried on the winds of change. Sometimes, when friends try to help by saying, "There's a reason for everything," or "It's a blessing in disguise," you just want to run away, or you want to say, "Yeah, if it's such a blessing, then why does it hurt so much?"

So, please forgive me when I say that everything that happens to us in life is a blessing-whether it comes as a gift wrapped in happy times or as a heartbreak, a loss, or a tragedy. It is true: There is meaning hidden in the small changes of everyday life, and wisdom to be found in the shards of your most broken moments. At the end of a dark night of the soul is the beginning of a new life. But it's hard to accept that when you're in pain, and its tiresome to hear about it from someone who's not.

When I am on a bad stretch of the journey, I am comforted most by the stories of other travelers who have made it past the humps and potholes. It helps me to remember that everyone is confused when the friendly forces come knocking; that there is no one alive who has not wanted to go back to sleep instead of make a big change; and that the journey from Once-Born innocence to Twice-Born wisdom is never easy.