Note:

This note was written for the month of Farvardin a few years ago. Perhaps it is not a bad idea to read it again and reflect on it.

That night we had just returned from a half‑day trip. I was watching an old film (White Nights, made in 1957—though the Iranian version directed by Mr. Motamen is one of my favorites).

Suddenly I felt a severe pain in my body. I fell to the ground. A terrible back pain seized one side of my spine and made me groan. I had never experienced such pain before. No matter what position I took, the pain did not change.

My wife noticed and came to help me. She prepared a hot water bottle for me. I also took a muscle relaxant and lay down. Gradually the pain quieted and I fell asleep.

In the morning I woke up with no problem at all.

The next day everything was fine.

I felt well—in fact, I even felt a kind of happiness.

Having felt pain had made me aware that even something as simple as getting up in the morning and carrying around a body without pain can be a great blessing.

Of course, the idea is simple and repeated many times:

Only the one who has faced misfortune knows the value of well‑being.

But experiencing it in one’s own flesh and blood is something else entirely.

As someone once said:

The world is a world of opposites.

The value of light is understood by those who have seen darkness,

the value of bread by those who have endured hunger,

and the value of being with others and loved ones by the absence and loss of one of them.

Life is complex.

(Borges writes that the most obvious characteristic of the universe is its complexity.)

Our own grief and suffering, the pain of those around us, the troubles of the people of our land, the stress and the problems, disastrous politics, and a mad world…

Life is like a large package from which everything emerges. In Forrest Gump there is a proverb repeated that life is like a box of chocolates—you never know what you are going to get.

The question is: why do we search only for the darkness and pain inside it?

Why do we not look at a child’s laughter in the street, the uproar of sparrows on the trees, or a young couple pressed close together, overflowing with laughter?

I remember many years ago, during one of my periods of depression. I was single and unemployed. I had the habit of going to the National Library in the mornings—it was then located on Si‑Tir Street. Books made me feel better.

At the bus stop near Falah Square I got on a bus. The stop was beside a kindergarten, and it was almost noon. The children were coming out and leaving with their parents. They were laughing and playing with their friends and the adults with them, filling the street with joy by their presence. It seemed as if the whole world was laughing with them.

I was sitting on the bus, watching this lively and joyful scene of childhood. Despite my depression, I felt that tightness in my chest and that bitterness inside me slowly fading away. The children’s laughter had brought me a gift of beauty and life.

Of course, for such phenomena there are psychological explanations in depression—that at the peak of despair and the desire for nothingness, a person begins to search for life and its small reasons.

My purpose in writing about this experience, and about last night’s experience, is to speak of a kind of sudden realization that comes upon a person: that pain and suffering are unavoidable, yet in this world of opposites the experience of darkness and pain somehow helps us understand the pleasure of light and well‑being.

Pain and suffering should be treated; we must seek solutions. Sometimes those solutions are not easily found, and sometimes there is no solution at all.

When a loved one, a child… is lost and a great tragedy descends—what solution is there?

Grief settles into the soul, and pain lashes at your being with bitterness and cruelty.

Yet within this package called life—which has given us so many unpleasant things—we can search. We can look for ways to heal pain, seek out the few happy moments, and at least listen to the call of the ya‑karim bird singing in the alley… or the rain… or the pleasant smell of earth filling the air after the dampness.

I have no doubt that pain and suffering come together with their opposites. Seeking, finding, and enjoying them—in children’s laughter, young lovers, and birds singing—is not difficult.

One must learn to see differently.

Hamid Yousefi

Farvardin 1400