Grip, Drift, and Time

This is a book about love, and so it has to be a book about suffering too. Anyone who has loved has suffered. The two are tangled together in every life I know.

But the Reality Equation says something about suffering that surprised me when I first saw it. Suffering is not a value of Reality.

Not a reading on the meter

Remember the meter. Reality above one is the AAH. Reality below one is the OO. Exactly one is unitless stability.

It would be natural to assume that suffering is simply the OO: a reading below one, a disappointment, the dot sliding down the line. But that is not what suffering is. A disappointment is a moment. It arrives, it registers, it passes. You can have a terrible OO at breakfast and be laughing by lunch.

Suffering is something else. It is what happens when a disappointment does not pass. And the reason it does not pass has nothing to do with how large the OO was. It has to do with three other things.

Three factors

I write it like this:

Suffering is roughly grip, times drift, times time.

Grip is how hard you insist on holding your chosen view. We met it in the chapter on the lens. It is the force with which you keep your picture of things in place, the marriage as it was, the career as it was supposed to go, the person as you needed them to be, while the reading underneath it changes.

Drift is how much the world's frame moves under you. A small drift barely registers. A large drift means that what keeps arriving is nothing like the picture you are holding.

Time is how long the strain lasts. A brief mismatch is a surprise. A mismatch held for months or years is something else entirely.

Between grip and drift there is a strain, a drag, the felt friction of a view held still while the world moves. Multiply the three. If any one of them is near zero, suffering is near zero. A light grip on a large drift for a long time is merely change. A hard grip on a tiny drift is merely fussiness. A hard grip on a large drift for a single moment is a shock. But a hard grip, on a large drift, held for a long time: that is suffering.

Why it is a multiplication

The reason this is a product rather than a sum matters, because it tells you something about where relief can come from.

In a sum, you would have to reduce everything to reduce the total. In a product, reducing any one factor reduces the whole. You often cannot reduce the drift; the world is not going to stop being what it is. You often cannot shorten the time. But any one of the three, brought closer to zero, brings suffering closer to zero with it.

Where the grip lives

Now notice something about grip that took me a long time to see.

Grip is not in the denominator. It is in the lens. It is how hard you hold your view, and the lens, unlike the two terms of the fraction, is willful. So grip is the one factor that is, in part, yours.

I have to be careful here, because this is exactly where it would be easy to turn the equation into a technique. Just loosen your grip. Just let go. That is not quite the instruction, and it is not easy. Twenty years of living by a view have trained your Prediction, too, through everything you did under it, and the Prediction cannot be released by deciding; it eases only by the road, by what keeps arriving.

But the lens itself can be held more lightly, and the way to hold it more lightly is not to adopt a new, more cheerful view. That would just be a different grip. It is to look at the meter. To let the reading be what it is. Flow, as I called it in the chapter on the lens: letting the view follow the live meter, with as little insistence as you can manage.

Consider someone who cannot stop checking their phone for a message from a person who has left. The grip is enormous: a view of the relationship as still alive, held against everything arriving. Looking at the meter, for them, might mean a single honest sentence said out loud: they are not going to write. That sentence does not change Reality; the message was not coming either way. It changes how hard the old view is being held. And then the road does the rest. Each hour the phone is left in another room is a small mark, an hour in which the message did not come and life went on. Enough of them, and the subconscious begins to answer its question differently. Is this the new norm? Yes.

That is not letting go by decision. It is honesty in the lens, and history in the record, working together.

The divine's view of it

There is one more thing to say, and it returns us to the beginning.

She is complete. Nothing is ever missing from her. Whatever has happened stays happened; nothing is ever subtracted from the record. Losses are real, and they arrive as Actuals. But the past they become part of lacks nothing.

Suffering lives entirely in the strain between what arrives and a view, held hard and held long, of something the Actual no longer contains. It is real. I do not want to minimize it by a single word. But it is not evidence that love has failed. Love has not failed. The Actual is still what it always was. What is happening is that you are holding a picture of the world that the world has moved on from, and holding it tightly, and holding it for a long time.

The kindest thing I know to say to someone who is suffering is not that they should let go. It is that the grip they feel is a measure of how much they loved what was, and that the road out runs through small, ordinary actions, one after another, made with as much gentleness as they can manage. And that, while they walk it, they are still loved. They were always loved. The past tense of that cannot be taken.