The Suffering School Uniform

And why we even have one

Photo by Preillumination SeTh on Unsplash

When I first came to Suffering School I did not know there was a school uniform. And only recently did I learn that I am wearing one. If you are a fellow student you also wear the uniform. Of course you won’t know it at first, none of us did, because they are invisible. Looking at us, all you would see would be our regular clothes and not the lightweight, flexible sheaths that cover them.

Like all clothing, our uniforms provide protection from the elements (albeit in a different way) while also allowing for wide range of individual expression— something that is not always the case with standard uniforms.

My awareness of the uniform started when I lost, over the month of January (on four separate occasions), a scarf, then a hat, then a different scarf and then another hat.

Trust me, I know how trivial this sounds, so after the second scarf went missing I stopped telling people. I could see by the looks on their faces that these losses appeared to them to be insignificant and my fault. To which I agreed-- it was so stupid.

Still, I mourned my hats and scarves even as I wondered about the strangely disproportionate level of grief I experienced with each loss. Then, another thing happened: after giving up hope of ever seeing my scarf/hat/scarf/hat again, one by one they returned to me. The joy I had at their return was also wildly disproportionate, which made me think there was something more here than just the loss of a couple hats and scarves.

It was the pattern that alerted me: 4-4-4-4, the four fours stood out right away. It was too symmetrical, too well designed, too mathy. I am bad all at math but Suffering School math is different, perhaps because it treats numbers as an ancient language— not a dead language but one that is alive and wants to tell you something. In order to see what the numbers were saying I had to first formulate an equation:

Losing items: 4-4+(x)<0

Finding items 0+4+(x) >4

The math was saying that the hats and scarves that came back to me were greater than the ones that went out because of x. When I did the algebra to solve for x I found the answer. Turns out x= the context, or, as the numbers like to call it—the logic (you will have to take all this on face value since I won’t be showing you my work, mainly because it takes up too much space as it includes entire novels, a few hundred songs and thousands of lines of verse).

One of the hallmarks of Suffering School math is the primacy of the heart’s role in our calculations.

“ABC!” our teachers remind us, which is short for always be considering the heart.

This method of considering the heart in all our problem solving is actually the foundation of Suffering School’s pedagogy.

Considering the heart, for someone like myself, is a relatively new skill. I am still learning how to pay attention to it especially when it responds in a disproportionate way to seemingly trivial matters.

Look, look, look, is what the heart is saying.

And you do look because you know by now that the heart is preparing you to see something. You may also be given a text to read which will further help to open your eyes. In my case I was given Elizabeth Bishop’s poem One Art. You know the one about mastering the art of losing by first losing small things, then progressing to bigger things, ending finally, with the loss of a person.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

My story was a reverse Elizabeth Bishop—I lost the big thing first and then worked my way around to the little things.

Yes, it was losing the Big Thing that landed me in Suffering School in the first place but ultimately it was the little things that opened my eyes to the existence of our school uniforms.

It is hard to explain how I came to see.

I do remember noticing that it felt as if my lost hats and scarves had kind of popped off me— as if something had propelled them from my body. Thankfully, they didn’t only go in one direction, they also came back, but only after I had given up hope of ever seeing them again. It was all kind of mysterious until I made a graph with my math equation and scaling the variable up and down, I could see, once I plotted it out, that this consistent pattern of repelling or drawing in had been happening to me the entire time I’ve been in Suffering School.

It may sound to you like a law of attraction thing, but it’s not. If anything, it is more like the law of gravity—it just does what it does without input or manipulation. And the “it”was the uniform.

But don’t think that uniforms control anything!

They don’t because they can’t. They, like the stars, as ancients tell us, only “incline, they don’t compel.”

My uniform, before I even knew I had one, was repelling certain people from me, people who, I can now say in retrospect, may not have been good for me to be around.

Conversely, the people I was inclined toward when I first arrived in Suffering School were those who had also gone through some losses, and also wore the uniform, but with a dignity that drew me to them.

Could it be one uniform’s proximity to another uniform doubled its strength?

Of course we are free to override the uniform. And many people do. I know I did for years, chasing after people or things that my uniform was trying to keep at bay. It was only when my heart spoke up and I allowed it to tell me in its own unmistakable way how wrong these things and people were for my well-being could I truly be at peace about it.

By the way, I am glad for the uniform, especially since I understand a bit better now what it is about.

But this leads to the next question: Why would my uniform repel my hats and scarves?

And the answer is—I don’t know.

Maybe it wanted me to see something, perhaps something else that had been lost way back, something I had never considered.

LOVE AFTER LOVE
by Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Photo by Hanna Lazar on Unsplash

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