The Longing to Turn Pain Into Something Beautiful

Photo by Silvestri Matteo on Unsplash

I, like most people, I think, treat pain like a problem to solve quickly. Isn’t it in our nature to escape discomfort when possible? Fix it, frame it, or file it away before anyone notices we’re struggling. For me, if I could turn the hurt into a lesson or a line in an essay or a reason to be stronger, I thought I could stay in control.

It’s not a bad impulse; not all bad, at any rate. Apart from seeking comfort, we’re also meaning-making creatures. We want our suffering to count for something.

But there’s an ache under that impulse. It’s a longing to turn pain into something meaningful or beautiful. It’s not just about surviving what hurts, but alchemizing it, justifying it, even redeeming it. Proving it wasn’t wasted.

That longing can be holy. And exhausting.

Rainer Maria Rilke, writing to a young poet in Letters to a Young Poet, said something that made me stop for a long time as I considered it. He wasn’t romanticizing pain or sadness. He was warning against the kind we perform for the crowd:

The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of.

Unlived. Rejected. Lost.

I don’t think Rilke was saying “never be sad in front of people.” He was drawing out what happens when we use volume, busyness, or performance to somehow shortcut the grief instead of letting it move through us. Sadness doesn’t just vanish. It has a way of digging deep underground and compounding. (Busyness was my go to.)

Earlier in the same letter he offers the gentler, and harder, truth: the large sadnesses may have “gone right through you.” Maybe they changed you somewhere deep, in ways you couldn’t see while you were in the middle of them. Transformation is almost never a moment you remember like looking at a photograph. It’s almost always the slow work that you do as time passes.

That idea resonates well in an article written by John P. Weiss called “Let It Pass Through You.” In his elegant prose, he implies that sadness has to move through us if we are to deepen our connection with ourselves. If we repress it, we risk caging what he calls the bluebird, “that fragile and essential part of ourselves that longs to turn pain into something beautiful.”

This is the tension I keep living in:

Passage (let it through, let it change you) and longing (please, let this mean something).

Both can be true. The trouble starts when longing becomes a demand for an immediate payout. When we need the pain to be beautiful now so we don’t have to feel it as pain.

For a year, I’ve been exploring this idea of carrying weight, about motivation that dries up, about the grace of starting small when life refuses to give you a cinematic breakthrough. Those pieces come from the same place as this one.

The longing to turn pain into something beautiful is related to the longing to be seen as whole. If I can show you a polished moral, a tidy thesis, or a brave face, maybe I won’t have to sit with the mess. Maybe I won’t have to admit how scared I am sometimes.

But beauty that skips the middle is often just “packaging.” It can even become a kind of cruelty, aimed at ourselves: You shouldn’t still feel this. You should have learned by now. Turn it into content and move on.

That’s nothing more than shame and hustle grief.

What, then, is the beautiful thing, if it isn’t instant alchemy?

Sometimes it’s art. Sometimes it’s a song that has a way of naming what you can’t say out loud, don’t have the words for, but somehow still makes you feel less alone.

Or maybe it’s in relationships. Maybe it’s how the edge drops out of your voice when you remember, suddenly, what it feels like to be misunderstood. Maybe it’s the patience you extend because you needed patience once and didn’t get it.

Sometimes it’s quiet integrity or showing up when you’re not motivated or doing the dishes because you don’t want to wake up to a messy kitchen. It might be choosing difficult honesty in a conversation that you could have easily kept superficial.

And sometimes the “beautiful” thing is just the truth without theater: telling someone you trust, “I’m not okay today,” without needing to say anything more.

None of that requires you to monetize or glamorize your pain. It doesn’t require you to be impressive, and it might not even require you to understand what the pain means yet.

Here’s what I’m trying to practice, mostly imperfectly:

• Let the sadness pass through. You can’t drown it. You have to give it room. I do this (sometimes) by journaling without an audience. I run. I sit with silence that I don’t fill with a podcast just to avoid my own thoughts.
• Separate longing from deadline. The desire for meaning is human. The demand for meaning on demand is a recipe for shame.
• Holding the bluebird gently. (I just learned this one.) The part of you that wants pain to become beauty isn’t your enemy. It’s a indication that you believe life is larger than whatever caused the pain. Just don’t ask that part to do all the emotional labor on day one.
• Stay suspicious of performed healing. If your healing only exists to be seen, you might be feeding the very noise Rilke warned about.

The world will keep selling us fast redemption: three steps, five habits, take this pill or that supplement, one morning routine that fixes your childhood; your broken marriage. I’m not against tools, but I am against the lie that you’re failing if you still ache.

For me, Rilke’s line about sadness that becomes “life that is unlived, rejected, lost” reads like a diagnosis. Weiss’s line about the bluebird reads like a hope.

Those things don’t contradict each other. They describe a kind of sequence:

First, let yourself live life, even the parts that hurt.

Then, over time, something else can emerge (if you let it). It won’t always be pretty and it will rarely happen on your timeline. Sometimes, it will be beautiful in the way truth sometimes is: plain, stubborn, and real.

If you carry the longing, maybe the kinder goal isn’t to force pain into beauty on contact.

Maybe it’s to stay hopeful and faithful enough, for long enough, for beauty to find you on the other side of passage.

Further reading (as cited above)

• Rainer Maria Rilke, *Letters to a Young Poet*
• John P. Weiss, “Let It Pass Through You,” Weiss Journal

The Music Carries The Weight of Everything

 

Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash

For as long as I can remember, orchestral movie scories have just hit different with me. One random Tuesday afternoon, shortly after I started my own business, I was sitting at my computer working through a complex issue for a client. I decided to go looking for a fresh batch of movie scores that I could build a “coding playlist” around. I stumbled on the work of Hans Zimmer (and others) for the “Pirates” movies.

“My Name Is Barbossa” (written by Geoff Zanelli) was the first piece to hit me on my new playlist.

My hands dropped into my lap. I sat back in my chair, and closed my eyes as the swells of music transported me right onto the deck of the “Black Pearl” standing next to Geoffrey Rush’s character whose hat always stays on his head no matter the fierceness of the wind.

Music seems to know that it’s always welcome to take up residence in my brain, rent free, as often as it likes, and music has a way of telling me the truth about what I’ve been sidestepping.

Barbossa’s theme does that for me every single time. So does “Drink Up Me Hearties Yo Ho.” In Barbossa’s theme, he strides into the frame like he owns the horizon, but the music gets there first. I don’t have the right words to describe it. The music carries the whole tragic majesty of his life—salt, shadow, greed, regret, sacrifice—and lays it all at his boots before he opens his mouth. He doesn’t have to explain himself. The score does it for him.

“Drink Up Me Hearties Yo Ho” closes “At World’s End” with Jack Sparrow sitting in a small dingy, his faithful compass pointing first at his rum then the place of the fountain of youth. Then, roll credits. That particular movie is jam-packed with powerful music, but the most incredible of all is relegated to the closing credits. I’ve written about this before. The whole sequence between 3:30 and 4:30 in that track blows my mind. I describe it to my wife as “music that breaks the heart and lifts the spirit.” I literally cried the first time I tried to explain it to her.

Then there’s Maverick—older now, and called on once again to do something impossible. There’s nothing mechanical about the way Captain Pete Mitchell flies. “Don’t think. Just do.” The music rises into something mythical. The instruments don’t highlight a moment; they tell you this is a man finishing a lifetime. A touchdown and a farewell in the same held breath. It’s strange. It’s the kind of music that convinces you that it’s okay to fly and fall apart at the same time.

It’s amazing how music does that! Words can circle something forever and still never get close. A chord hits and suddenly your whole soul remembers a story you didn’t realize you were carrying. I’ve spent months writing about emotions, but a few seconds of Hans Zimmer make all my essays look like they’re just getting started.

I’m not sure why this kind of music gets to me. Maybe it’s because I’ve always been drawn to people who arrive with more presence than volume. The ones who move through a room like their own theme is playing at a frequency only a few people pick up on.

I’ve met people like that. They’re the ones whose advice always comes softly, and whose example I often don’t appreciate until years later. They didn’t have swagger. They didn’t try to sell me their wisdom in pre-packaged courses for the low, low price of… whatever. They just lived in a way that made me rethink my own pace. I never knew what to call that quality until I realized they had their own kind of soundtrack. Not the big, heroic kind. More like a steady undercurrent you only notice when you choose to be quiet enough.

It makes me wonder if part of adulthood is learning to hear themes you used to miss.

I think about the way certain movie cues hit me. My brain remembers the feeling long before it remembers the scene. A piece of music rises and suddenly I’m not the age I am. It’s like I’m every version of myself at once. The kid who wanted to be brave. The teenager who didn’t know how to grieve. The young dad pretending exhaustion wasn’t catching up with him. The man trying not to break under a storm he refused to name.

Music doesn’t care about your timeline. It just tells you the truth.

And maybe that’s why these scores stay with me. They carry the weight I don’t have language for. They let me sit inside moments I’ve outgrown but never resolved. They remind me of who I wanted to be without scolding me for who I became.

Some days, when I don’t know what to feel or how to say it, I put on a soundtrack and let the strings sort it out. Zimmer does more for my emotional life in four minutes than I can do in a week of thinking.

I still don’t fully understand why certain notes undo me. Or why a fictional pirate can make me feel more human than a motivational podcast ever could. Or why the right chord progression makes everything in my chest line up like a flock of birds figuring out where to fly next.

But maybe I don’t need to understand it. Maybe the music knows the weight I’m carrying before I do. Maybe it holds it for me for a minute, long enough for something inside to settle.

For now, that feels like enough.