No, you yourself have to take your life seriously. Feel its weight. Admit its complexity. And as Jungians would say, honor its shadows. Irony can come only from an awareness of the good and the bad, the successes and the failures, the areas of intelligence and the zones of folly and ignorance.
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Your dark night is forcing you to consider alternatives. It is taking you out of the active life of submission to alien goals and purposes. It is offering you your own approach to life. You can sit with it and consider who you are and who you want to be. You can be fortified by it to stand strong in your very existence. You can be born again, not into an ideology that needs your surrender, but into yourself, your uniqueness, your God-given reality, the life destined for you.
The people I trust most to be my teachers and guides can laugh at the human situation and at themselves. They can see irony in the most serious matters. Their laughter seems to free up their compassion and liberate them from narcissistic worry about themselves. Tragedy tends toward self-pity, while a more subtle and complicated view allows you to go beyond any preoccupation with yourself.
It may be your fate to have, metaphorically, elephant ears, and yet, with the proper vision, you may see the beauty in your essential anomaly and understand that it comes from Heaven. You may be graced by it, whatever it is, even though it may seem to be entirely out of context. You may have to stretch your imagination to appreciate it, and yet you can base your life on it.
Many people claim to have integrated their shadow sides, but that effort is itself a work against the dark. To integrate it is to co-opt it into the light. The real task is to live in, and with, the darkness, appreciating its unredeemed value and loving its irreversible qualities. What is needed is a view of life that includes the dark.
As Carl Jung notes, ‘Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.’ Jung goes on to assert that humans place the positive and negative attributes of our character—our feelings, beliefs, the things we typically define as strengths and weaknesses; anything that conflicts with our sense of who and what we are supposed to be—into our personal shadow. This allegorical shadow operates the way our true shadow does—behind us, just out of our direct sight, where we have but the vaguest awareness of its existence. We glimpse it only by craning our necks.