Life is pain, Princess

On Falling Upward and the wisdom of The Princess Bride

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I’m reading Richard Rohr’s book, Falling Upward, about spirituality in the second half of our lives. Because both Brené Brown and Bono have talked about it recently. And because in an interview with Brené Brown, Richard Rohr seemed like just the most delighted human being I’ve ever heard and I wanted some of what he had. Also, because I need some help figuring out how to negotiate the second half of my own life.

I’ll admit, I don’t understand everything Rohr is saying in the book. Okay, I only understand like a fourth of it. But I’m trying and here’s what I’ve gotten so far.

In the first half of our lives, we’re building a container, made up mostly of identity and ego. This is who I am. This is what I want to accomplish—make a lot of money, buy a big house, become famous.

In the second half of our lives, we’re figuring out how to fill that container. This involves letting go of our egos. Figuring out what comes next, after we have (or haven’t) made a lot of money, bought the big house, become famous.

Why all of this made me think of a line from The Princess Bride I cannot tell you, but it has. Maybe by the end of this newsletter, I’ll have figured it out. Maybe not.

We were all so much younger back then, weren’t we?

If you haven’t seen The Princess Bride, god bless you. Let us speak of it no more. If you have (or if you’ve seen it, like me, more times than you can count), you might remember the scene when Butercup has been kidnapped by the Dread Pirate Roberts. They’re being pursued by Humperdinck and as they rest for a moment, they get into an argument. Buttercup is acting very brave/entitled/naive.¹ The Dread Pirate Roberts who (spoiler) is really Westley, says to her, “Life is pain, Princess. Anyone who tells you differently is selling something.”

I’ve spent a lot of time over the years thinking about this quote.² More time than I should probably admit. When I was young, I thought Westley was clearly lying. Life isn’t pain. That’s a horrible way to think about the world. Who lives that way? Even though I was a child who cried on the drive home after seeing The Princess Bride for the first time because the movie was so perfect and I knew my life would never be like that. Even that child didn’t want to believe that life was pain. Shut up, Westley. What do you know?

When this quote popped back into my head recently, I found that in my memory, I’d changed the word ‘pain’ to ‘suffering.’ “Life is suffering, Princess,” was how I remembered the quote. The influence, of course, of Buddhism. One of the Four Noble Truths. Existence is suffering, though that, too, is a bad translation. Life is dissatisfaction might be better. Life is itchy and uncomfortable. Life is pain. Why? Who cares? How do we make it better? That’s the real question.

So at forty-eight, with an index finger that won’t fully bend and wonky knees and whatever else the random ache of the day is, Westley’s line rings a little more true than it did at thirteen. Life is pain or suffering or whatever you want to call it.

And, fuck yes, anyone who tells you something different is, in fact, trying to sell you something. A convenient lie. An easy solution. Salvation in the form of a new pill or ointment to make the pain go away. That one line might be all you need to understand modern capitalism—people selling us stuff that we hope will make the pain go away. All the pains. But it doesn’t work. It never works.

So what does this all have to do with Richard Rohr and the second half of my life? Beats the hell out of me. Maybe, in the first half of our life, we have to believe that life is not pain. We’re so busy with the building of that ego and identity. We’re carving out a safe space in order to survive the onslaught of the world. We have setbacks, but it’s all an upward trajectory, right? Progress, progress! We keep moving because it’s what we have to do.

And then things slow down. We slow down, as in, it takes us longer to walk from one place to the other. Longer to get up the stairs. Children grow up. Parents and other loved ones die. We realize that our own deaths are coming for us, too, sooner than we’d like. Life slows down and the suffering becomes more and more difficult to deny.

Why deny it, anyway? What’s the point? It takes a lot of effort and we’re getting exhausted. We need at least one nap just to get through the day. What if we just embraced the idea that life is pain, because we’re moving toward the wisdom that life is also joyous, and riotously so? We’re figuring out that, in fact, both things are true and that, too, is a beautiful thing. We are embracing paradox. We are, I guess, learning how to fill that container we spent so much time building.

And, sure, in the movie version of The Princess Bride, there’s a happy ending. But in the book, it’s not so certain. Wesley has, after all, been resurrected from the dead. How long will that last? Inigo is mortally wounded, his stomach split open and his guts spilling out. Humperdinck isn’t dead and maybe he and Buttercup are married and he’s still a dick, either way.

Life is pain, so there may not be any truly happy endings, but maybe that’s okay. Maybe happiness is fleeting, a thing to be chased in that first half of life. Maybe the ending is really only a beginning, the second half of the story yet to be told. Maybe all of these things, which seem to contradict each other, are also still true.

Maybe? I don’t know. I only understood like a fourth of the book, after all.

1. Brave, yes, maybe in that first half of life sort of way, which is also entitled and naïve. What Buttercup says to the Dread Pirate Roberts first is, “You mock my pain!” And, yeah, Buttercup, stop taking your pain so fucking seriously. Sometimes, laughing at your pain is all you’ve got. Or cherishing your pain. Or celebrating your pain, as in, my knee hurts because I’ve managed to live long enough to get arthritis. Here’s to that! Get over yourself, Buttercup. Maybe that’s what Richard Rohr is saying?

2. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about many quotes from The Princess Bride, almost all of them chock full of wisdom, including, “Never get involved in a land war in Asia,” but no one ever learns that lesson, do they?