You are suspended like scales between your sorrow and your joy
– Kahlil Gibran
Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet acts as a spiritual salve, offering timeless and gentle wisdom that soothes the heart and awakens the mind. The Prophet is generous in its tone, doling out compassion and patience in turn. Gibran’s voice speaks to the shared humanity of our troubles, and in the process he humanizes the process of pain and suffering.
While our destiny is to be ever suspended between overwhelming sensations of sorrow and joy, we need not find meaninglessness in this very human state of affairs. While Gibran urges us not to victimize ourselves he takes a realist approach, describing how our suffering and loneliness shape us and become embedded within the contours of our character. Indeed, we can ultimately find a degree of solace in our pain, in it an affirmation of our will to live and our will to feel:
“Long were the days of pain I have spent within its walls, and long were the nights of aloneness; and who can depart from his pain and his aloneness without regret?”
In recognizing the symbiotic relationship between sorrow and joy, Gibran affirms that each is the necessary counterpart of the other. Psychologically, there is something like a quantum emotional entanglement between the two states. They both work to reinforce each other, supporting and nourishing the psychological pathways that allow the other to come to fruition and fully actualize itself:
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain. And is not the lute that soothes your spirit the very wood that was hollowed with knives?
This sentiment echoes that of the British naturalist poet William Wordsworth, writing a century earlier:
More skillful in self knowledge, even more pure as tempted more; more able to endure, as more exposed to suffering and distress; thence, also, more alive to tenderness
Gibran galvanizes us to widen the scope of our vision, perhaps opening ourselves up to the possibility that pain has as much to teach us as pleasure:
And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy; and you would accept the seasons of your heart.
In this gentle reminder he mirrors the philosophy and ethos of Rilke, another poetic mind who knew of the co-mingling of sorrow and joy and discussed it at length in Letters to a Young Poet:
Perhaps we would endure our sadnesses with greater confidence than our joys
– Rilke
Gibran warns us of dwelling in misery and demonstrates how negativity can function as a learned social behaviour:
And you have been told also that life is darkness, and in your weariness you echo what was said by the weary
But just as surely as he warns us of blindly seeking refuge in our pain, lest we construct an unrealistically hostile worldview, so too does he speak to the limits of pleasure seeking and hedonism:
Pleasure is a freedom song: but it is not freedom. It is the blossoming of your desires, but it is not their fruit. It is a depth calling unto a height, but it is not the deep nor the high. It is the caged taking wing, but it is not space encompassed.
Ultimately, Gibran’s words compel us to find the courage and authenticity to find a voice for both our sorrow and our joy. Fully embodying our emotions gives form to the formless and allows us to access the unknown quantities in our interior lives.
And if it is for your comfort to pour your darkness into space, it is also for your delight to pour forth the dawning of your heart
