If each of us were to take our sorrows and put them in a box…

[Goes a Hasidic teaching]

And then given a choose of choosing any box we wished…

Each of us would take back our own, for all the rest would seem even more difficult to bear.

What I learn from this Hasidic teaching is that each of us feels deeply connected to our “stuff.” Even when it’s stuff that we might think we’d rather put in a box and leave behind, like the stuff of our sorrows. Contrary to what we might think or feel, it turns out that we aren’t so quick to let our sorrows go. Maybe that’s because we don’t want to trade them for potentially greater sorrows. But I actually think it’s because our sorrows are part of our story. And we are, for understandable reasons, very connected to our story and our stories. Leaving behind our sorrows means potentially losing part of our story. And the prospect of losing our story is something that many of us fear. We would rather keep our stories, whatever those stories may be, than to confront the possibility of a blank page at the core of our being.

 

Choosing our Sorrows