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The Hard and the Beautiful

The Hard and the Beautiful

When I lived in New York I would regularly pass through Times Square. 

It always had a few 'end is near' prophets begging the tourists and the strippers, the 3 card Monte dealers and kids that sold a pint of blood for 6 bucks on the 42 St clinic, to repent. When I was broke once I tried. They threw me out. I hadn't eaten in a few days and they said I would pass out down a pint. Too much trouble.

I recall passing by them hectoring the sinner...hungry me... with their certainty and their signs.

There was one guy that stood at the corner of 42nd and Broadway. But instead of bellowing about righteous punishment and how near judgement was he stood still repeating the same few sentences.

"Living is hard. Living is beautiful."

 The hard is trying to make you beautiful."

Whenever I passed by I would look for him. Once in a downpour I stood next to him waiting for the rain to ease. He repeated his gospel again and again and seeing me near seemed uncomfortable and worried.

I said hello. He stared at me in terror with wide unblinking eyes for a long moment. Then he whispered to me, as though he were telling me a secret.

"Living is hard."

I caught sight of us in a window's reflection. A lost soul driven mad by his truth and a pauper boy in search of his.

I nodded and whispered back at him

"But living is ...beautiful?"

He began to nod frantically. Then suddenly composed he stopped and looking into my eyes, repeated his creed.

"The hard is trying to make you beautiful."

I closed my eyes. It sounded true. That resonance ringing from somewhere at the back of me.

The rain let up and as I walked away he began again... his quiet chant to the unlistening rush hour crowd hurrying by.

Like anyone...like all of you...I have come up against the edge of the hard. We all do. It's the nature of the beast. 

But now when I think back on the hard things...the heartbreak and loss...my modest share of suffering, I can see, at last, what first seemed like damage, irreparable and terrible...changed me.

I feel like a stone beneath a sculptor's hammer, crying out at every blow about the pain and loss. 

But finally crucially changed too...the only way I could have been. Freed from the stone. As yet unfinished, but touched by a kind of hard beauty.

I'm writing this today because of the news, as yet unconfirmed, that we may face more isolation, more time and distance and disease. More sculptor's hammer blows.

More hard. 

I hope not. But a nation becomes great...in the same way any person does. Through struggle and through the beauty it leaves in its wake.

If this is coming, I hope you come to know what I do. What I have come to believe. What I hear calling to me from a street corner of my past and what I whisper to myself like a prayer each night...

Living is hard. Living is beautiful...

But the hard is trying to make you beautiful.


WLM

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