The relaxing of your will, however desperate, allows life to proceed. It may not go according to your plan, but whatever it makes will be more secure and ultimately more satisfying that anything you could force into existence. Such are the lessons of a dark night.
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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.
We can’t understand what is happening to us, and if we are in the habit of always wanting to know what is going on, this aspect of the dark night will be maddening. We can find meaning in these times of change, but we have to think differently about our lives, be less psychological in our approach, and more philosophical and spiritual.
It’s tempting to become the hero and savior, but getting life in apparent order is not the same as giving the soul what it needs. It may need more chaos, deeper impasse, and increased darkness.
You can trust them [emotions and fantasies], not to arrange life the way you want it, but to arrange the elements of your soul in a way that will offer rich life in the future.
The dark night of illness sets severe limits on what you can do. It forces you to slow down and focus on the things that matter. It keeps you in one place and on your back. It prevents you from eating what you want and doing the things you are used to doing.