All of us, if we dare to look, have at least one defining moment which has altered the trajectory of our lives. And the deeper we dig, through the years, at this moment, the more treasures she avails to us.
Mine was subtle and unexpected.

My family had just gone through a veritable Dark Night of the Soul.
Due to a drunk driver, we were involved in a horrific car accident late one night, on a small strip of highway, on the way home from a friend’s birthday party.
We had barely escaped death that night, we were told by the paramedics on the scene. Our car looked like a smashed sardine tin can.

The next morning, however, my life changed.
Like every other morning, I hopped out of bed, but this time I fell to the ground. My knee wasn’t able to support my weight.

I’ll spare you most of the details: The pain of having my knee drained. The shots directly into my knee so the doctors could see the tissue damage. Needless to say, I needed surgery to repair my cartilage and ligament that were torn when the seat of the car collapsed on my knee.
In the days before the date of my surgery, I remember asking my mom: Why, me? Why is God doing this to me?
I don’t remember her answer. I don’t think there was an answer.
I remember waking up with my mouth drier than the Sahara after the surgery. I got carted to my hospital room where I would recover over the next week. As I lay there, in pain, recovering from my surgery, I still didn’t have an answer to my question.
That’s when, at the height of my self-pity, I got a roommate. They rolled in Robbie, who took the bed to my right. Robbie had been run over by an 18-wheeler. Not a toy truck–the real thing. He had to have skin grafted from his butt and other parts of his body to fix up his leg.

And this was to be my defining moment. Hearing the sounds of a boy around my age wailing beside me, I had a realization: no matter how bad you got it, somebody, somewhere, has it worse.

It may not seem like much, but it put everything that was happening into perspective for me. What I was going through, and complaining about, was nothing compared to his experience. And I have carried this lesson with me throughout my life.
The realization was comforting that other people suffer, and were suffering, more than me. I think prior to that moment, I had felt all alone in my pain and suffering. And that made it more dreadful: feeling alone in my suffering.
And that takes me to Miguel de Unamuno and his classic work, Tragic Sense of Life.
I’ll start with the poem I wrote today, inspired by Unamuno:

Above all,
Pity God;
Feeler of all feelings,
Sufferer of all sufferings.

I was given a rare gift at an early age.
Great suffering, and the subsequent witnessing of the suffering of another.

Unamuno:
If you look at the universe as closely and as inwardly as you are able to look—that is to say, if you look within yourself; if you not only contemplate but feel all things in your own consciousness, upon which all things have traced their painful impression—you will arrive at the abyss of the tedium, not merely of life, but of something more: at the tedium of existence, at the bottomless pit of the vanity of vanities. And thus you will come to pity all things; you will arrive at universal love.
In order to love everything, in order to pity everything, human and extra-human, living and non-living, you must feel everything within yourself, you must personalize everything.

Consciousness is participated knowledge, is co-feeling, and co-feeling is com-passion. Love personalizes all that it loves. Only by personalizing it can we fall in love with an idea. And when love is so great and so vital, so strong and so overflowing, that it loves everything, then it personalizes everything and discovers that the total All, that the Universe, is also a Person possessing a Consciousness, a Consciousness which in turn suffers, pities, and loves, and therefore is consciousness. And this Consciousness of the Universe, which love, personalizing all that it loves, discovers, is what we call God.

My own suffering forced me to feel. And in truly feeling the suffering of an other, I was given an experience in being able to feel all people’s suffering by extension.
Which brings me back to Unamuno’s idea of the Universe as Consciousness.

The Universe is alive. The Universe is conscious. The Universe feels.
And that means everything and everyone.
And to feel everything is to love everything;
to become everything.

And who is our teacher for all of this?
God/Consciousness.

Can you imagine being conscious of—that is, feeling—all suffering?
It’s heart-breaking!

And, yet, isn’t that what it means to be human?
To be brave enough to allow ourselves to feel that which is difficult, perhaps even seemingly impossible, to feel?

To pity is to feel is to know is to love.