OMG Digital Magazine OMG Issue 281 19th October 2017 | Page 6

OMG Digital Magazine | 281 | Thursday 19, October, 2017 • PAGE 6
SoulFood
How Elizabeth Gilbert Learned to
Transform Suffering Into Growth
You can let life’s inevitable torments cut you down—or you can use them to grow.
By Elizabeth Gilbert
Many years ago, I met a man named Jim MacLaren, who
had one of the most extraordinary life stories I’d ever
heard. Jim had come into manhood with all the promise in
the world: He’d been an ambitious student at Yale and was
a talented athlete and handsome young actor in training.
Then one beautiful fall evening in New York City—one of
those shimmering, velvety nights, he said, when everything
seems possible—he was hit by a bus and lost part of his
leg. But Jim was a survivor, and so he overcame his loss
and transformed himself into a champion marathoner and
Ironman athlete.
Inspiring, right?
But wait—it doesn’t end there.
Several years later, Jim was competing in a triathlon.
Despite his prosthetic leg, he was far ahead of many of his
more able-bodied competitors, leading a pack of speeding
bicyclists down a stretch of road that was supposed to be
closed for the race. A van, which was mistakenly allowed to
pass through the intersection, hit Jim and instantly broke
his neck. Now the amputee was a quadriplegic.
Suddenly it’s not such an inspiring story. Suddenly it’s a
horrifying story, one that raises all sorts of unanswerable
questions about life and suffering and injustice. After the
second accident, Jim awoke in the hospital enraged at
God: It wasn’t enough to throw a bus at me? You had to
break my neck, too?
Jim’s story goes so far beyond the realm of “fair” that it
knocks the breath right out of you. Why would a good man
be put through such torment?
We’ve all seen this happen. Destiny starts raining down
hammers on somebody and will not let up. Just when your
friend’s cancer is in remission, her house burns down. On
the same day your sister gets fired, her husband walks out
on her. The surprise tax bill arrives just a few hours before
your mother’s funeral. Sometimes it’s one catastrophe after
another. You don’t know whether you should duck, weep,
run screaming, or just start punching in all directions.
When I face a catastrophe of my own, I remember Jim
MacLaren. After he broke his neck, he fell into depression
and drug addiction. But a spirit in this man kept reaching
for the light—a spirit of divine curiosity, which pushed
him to ask, Who am I now, after I’ve lost everything? By
the time I met Jim, he’d answered that question. Peaceful
in his wheelchair, he radiated certainty that his entire
purpose (indeed, his entire identity) was to live in a state
of unconditional love.
I asked him whether he thought his suffering had
transformed him into a better person.
“Absolutely,” he said.
I asked whether suffering always transforms people into a
better version of themselves.
“Not necessarily,” he said.
Jim explained to me that suffering is one of the most
powerful energy forces in the universe—but only if you
use it as an instrument of change. People must be willing
to journey all the way to the bottom of their pain and
experience full catharsis—to completely break apart
so they can then rebuild themselves anew. As Jim said,
“Suffering without catharsis is nothing but wasted pain.”
He said the world is filled with people who have suffered
horribly and crawled away broken. They never reached
catharsis; they just got shattered and stayed shattered.
And then there are the great masters (Gandhi, Mandela,
King) who used their suffering as an incredible engine to
transform into something better.
Jim MacLaren taught me never to waste my pain—he
taught me to enter straight into it with divine curiosity
instead of running from it.
And if you can learn to do that? Honestly, my friends, you
can do anything.