We Get Deeper--a Benefit of Pain

On March 14  David Brooks wrote a beautiful column about how we find and develop depth in a life. WE all want depth, yes? BUt the things that depend us? Well, maybe not so much. But character, we ant that. And intellectual depth, we want that too. But "deepening" comes thru experiences that often are hard--disciplines and sometimes the discipline is illness or grief. These are processes we know in CancerLand. 

Here is a paragraph from Brooks March 14th column called "The Deepest Self":

So much of our own understanding of our depth occurs later in life, also amid suffering. The theologian Paul Tillich has a great essay in “Shaking the Foundations” in which he observes that during moments of suffering, people discover they are not what they appeared to be. The suffering scours away a floor inside themselves, exposing a deeper level, and then that floor gets scoured away and another deeper level is revealed. Finally, people get down to the core wounds and the core loves.

And here is the link to the whole essay in the New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/14/opinion/brooks-the-deepest-self.html