The Weight I Carry

There are days when life feels like carrying a suitcase with no handle. Heavy, awkward, impossible to set down, yet somehow I keep dragging it along. It’s filled with stories I no longer read, griefs I never named, promises that once glittered like gold but now rust quietly in the corners.

And I ask myself, why do I keep carrying what no longer serves?

Perhaps, because pain has a strange way of convincing us it is our identity.

Perhaps, because the familiar ache feels safer than the emptiness that follows letting go.

But then, there are rare moments. Small, fleeting, almost shy when I glimpse the truth. That the heaviness is not the enemy, but the teacher. That the cracked suitcase has been shaping my spine, forcing me to bend low enough to kiss the ground, to remember my fragility, to remember that all strength first begins in surrender.

I used to think transformation meant freedom from pain. But now I begin to wonder if it means walking with pain until it softens into presence. Like a stone in the river, rough and stubborn, until the water smooths its edges and it becomes something you can hold gently in your palm.

The pain of betrayal, the ache of loneliness, the weight of failure, they are not punishments, they are chisels. And though I resist them, they carve me into a shape that can hold light.

There is a crack in my chest I cannot close. But through that crack, the wind enters, and with it, the fragrance of a sky I never knew I could breathe.

I do not ask anymore for the burden to vanish. I ask only for the courage to sit with it, to learn the language it speaks, to let it teach me the art of being unguarded.

Because slowly, painfully, beautifully, the weight I carry is no longer just a wound. It is also a window. And through it, I begin to see myself.

let me not run from this wound, from this pain,

nor seek to drown it in wisdom,

let me rest my head,

in the lap of

what is,

and let it rock me,

until,

the ache becomes,

a lullaby...!!

And now I see with quiet clarity what Buddha meant, not as an idea, but as a lived truth, 'Pain is certain, suffering is optional.'

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© 2025 Beyond Silence. Written by 'the one listening.'

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