The Ten Thousand Joys & Ten Thousand Sorrows

There have been innumerable joys in my life. The awe-inspiring places I’ve seen, the events I’ve experienced, and most importantly the truly amazing people who have touched me and shared my journey. These things I remember.

In the quiet of the night, when I look back at my life I’m astounded by the intensity of that joy. It’s like a summer sun that reveals the wonders of the world and warms you to the core, endlessly giving the gift of life to all. But it’s also intense: the heat and light sometimes becoming too much to bear. It seems impossible for one man’s heart to encompass so much joy. And yet I’ll carry the flaming memory of those joys for the rest of my life.

The sorrows… I’ve been lucky; it doesn’t seem like I’ve had as many sorrows. Mostly they’re about loss: places that I’ll never see again, experiences that cannot be repeated, and the realization that my remaining time on Earth is limited.

But like my joys, my deepest and most intense pains are for the loss of the people whom I have loved, whether that loss comes from death, estrangement, or merely the inevitable changes that come with the passage of time. The only analogy that comes to mind for such pain is of a white-hot bar of steel, burning deep inside. These, too, I remember, and will bear every day that I live.

Lying awake at 4am, thinking about the people I’ve known, I find myself incapable of containing so much joy and sorrow. It leaks out, uncontrolled and raw.

I am the heart of a flame, raging with the heat of innumerable joys and the searing intensity of my sorrows.

For a man who since childhood has been accused of not having any emotions—and I often question it myself—I can’t even begin to conceive of what it would be like for someone to feel these things more intensely than I do, when I allow myself to open my heart to them.

Maybe I’m just particularly good at hiding those feelings, even from myself. It’s something I’m working to overcome.