A Very Limited Way to Handle Sadness

I had some long sad stretches. These days they are called "depression". Mine were caused - partially - biochemically: The spiritual and biochemical phenomenon I called "my first wife" extricated herself from "our" life.

It wasn't even "my" life she left, but a knotted combination of our lives that remained, for over a year after her departure, the same knotted combination of a life I couldn't let go of and the life of the ghost of her. The future we'd created for ourselves in which we were together persisted, kept trying to crowd out of existence any new future I tried to create.

One thing I learned from that period is the long-term folly of depending on memories of happier days to pull one out of the dumps. Depressed, we remember sad things. If we try to remember happy things, soon we can no longer find the joy in them. Drawing on hopes turns hopes gray.

We make our pictures to suit and solidify our moods, so it is foolish to expect cheerful memories to fish us out. There are no cheerful memories, only cheerful rememberers. I must think up a cheerful me to think my cheerful thoughts.

What seemed to work (as a cope measure) was walking and looking at what was there, and that meant walking for hours before, at some point, I would see something, anything (a tree, a house, a pattern of light and shade and motion, kids playing in a park) and maybe even feel something.

The trick was not to be fooled by the lifelessness of all I saw, the way my vision cast a grayness over even the brightest day, to know (take it on faith) that I was putting that there and just keep walking (letting my thoughts plod along with me in their tedious rounds: Why did she have to...? Why couldn't she have...? Why did I...?), just keep walking and looking about and, really, peeking out of my thoughts to notice a sidewalk crack here, a fire hydrant there.

Deadly to remember how beautiful trees were to me once and try to jump-start joy by forcing myself to look at trees; why waste them thus? It's like getting mud on a treasured toy, then, to make it better, pushing all one's other toys into the same mud.

Perhaps this is because the end of a relationship is filled with attempts to force emotions into being. This often happens gradually, so that one doesn't realize it is happening. She turns a fraction of a degree colder, so, without knowing one is doing it, one turns up his heat a fraction of a degree. (One doesn't know one is doing it, because one doesn't want to admit that she's more distant.) And as the gap widens, in tiny increments one increases that effort to make love happen, until, at the end, one is hollering over an abyss to communicate to someone so far away (as if across Grand Canyon) that one isn't sure anyone is there, and all one gets back is echoes.

So as soon as one tries (on such a walk) to make the world beautiful and responsive, one stirs up the the ashes, which turn the world gray and get in one's lungs and eyes. Because it's the same reach, the same enforcement.

(One does all this. One, that lonely pronoun, so appropriate here, like Emily Dickinson's "formal feeling".)

So finding (on many walks) that recalling happier times soon became like sniffing one's own vomit, I learned to be patient with the world, to walk and notice and impose as little as possible upon either my thoughts or what I saw, and I discovered that gradually, increasingly often, I'd find myself right then and there being me again and the world alive around me.

Really what I discovered is that there is no loss, that whatever happiness I'd ever had had been in myself, and that whatever ability I'd had to access that happiness could not be lost. It could be buried, but never destroyed.

And it only takes a second of revival, of suddenly, unexpectedly slipping into that imperishable ocean of joy, of what - it now seems to me - one basically IS; just an instant of it after days of work that has lost its purpose and long rambling walks, just an instant, and loss begins to disintegrate, like the first rumblings of a frozen river at the start of a spring thaw. There are days when the sky is solid dead gray, spitting cold drizzle. And after you walk a mile or so, you see a thin spot in the gray, just a haze of blue, and after another mile, you find yourself under a tiny hole in the gray, visible vertical rays of sunlight surrounding you, and then you put your attention elsewhere for what seems a few minutes, then notice that things are more sharply defined, more brilliant, then realize that the clouds are gone except for a few blindingly white puffs here and there in a sea of gold and blue. It can happen that fast. Does it last? No matter if it doesn't, if the day turns dark again. That dark no longer has the same power to daunt you.

Of all my gripes with chemical psychiatry, my loudest is simply this: Losses and tangles of things said and done that shouldn't have been said and done and all the other mires that spatter us daily coat awareness with smeary muck and cut us off from ourselves. The pills a shink gives us, when "effective", are effective because they coat that smeary muck with a shiny lacquered finish and make it hard to see or touch. In doing so, they impose between us and what we truly are yet another layer -- a layer even more impenetrable than the muck.

Trust yourself a little longer. Trust the world a little more. You are still there. You can still communicate. There is still something there to which you can communicate. There is still a playing field. Better games are still possible.

[Soon after my longest bout with sadness, I discovered something that would have accelerated the recovery process 100 fold and which has, since then, spared me a great deal of worn-down shoe leather. This you can learn about here.]

Nailing Down the Spirit

Cartoons tell us that "the spirit" is a transluscent white image of your body that rises from the body when it dies. Some versions have the evil become black shapes that fall from the body.

The spirit - that is, you, for example, or I -- the spirit has no form, but we insist on trying to REPRESENT it as an ethereal woman, a dove, a mountain, a white sheet with eye-holes, etc., for it is unreal to us that what we are can feel such pain, yet not be touched, see such suffering, yet not be seen.

Life taxes the spirit, and we oppose taxation without representation.

Tabulating a Life

I'm dead now, in Heaven, I think, though it could be hell--they don't say. I have lots of time - I guess it's still called time time - to review my life and develop a statistical breakdown: Time spent saying "How are you" and "Fine, thank you" or listening to the news or brushing teeth or wondering if I shouldn't be doing something about the yard or having sex, eating, tasting, talking, saying something - anything you can think of, very impressive, all these records at my disposal, reams of figures, everything I did measurable.

Truly, I have lived.

Protesting Protest Songs

It's like "The butler did it!", these protest songs where, whatever bad thing happens to poor folks, surprise! surprise!--the rich folks did it and also the politicians, and maybe all of us
(either because we didn't know it was happening or because we did, but didn't prevent it or even because, on a day when, somewhere, children were starving , we were on a picnic, enjoying sunshine, beer, egg salad sandwiches and one another).

Such songs should begin, "I suppose you're wondering why I've asked you all here...".

I say these things, and yet, I'm glad to be reminded from time to time of all that cannot simply be left to "the experts" and that I am part of a world that includes much misery. Apart from their glibness, there are only two things wrong with protest songs:

1. If it is wrong to take pleasure in sunsets, food, love, etc., while others elsewhere are suffering, then, since always somewhere someone suffers, it is wrong ever to enjoy oneself, in which case, what's the point? Why feed the starving children, for example, if life is to be a gray miasma of self-conscious sympathy.

2. It is important to point out abuses, but no group (poor, blacks, women, etc.) ever rises above its miseries solely by blaming others for them. Why promote the cult of the victim? It is very tempting to victims -- it's so easy to be a victim, so much easier than looking to see what part of one's condition one can improve and how one's own decisions and actions have contributed to it. But the road out of traps always involves increased responsibility -- on the part of both individuals and groups.

At this point someone says, "But surely a starving infant in sub-Saharan Africa can't be said to have contributed to his own misery!" There are answers to that, answers that address its substance, but really, the question is irrelevant, since our protest songs don't persuade the children they are victims. The songs persuade those who weep over the children (parents, for example) that they are victims, that it's their role in life to weep and supplicate, and our role to feel guilty or send money.

It's probably true that the best thing to do with a starving child is feed and educate him/her, not talk about responsibility. That's called coping.

It's also true that we do not get stronger by blaming others for our conditions in life. We may get paid damages by a court and you we may get vengeance, but we do not get stronger. We end up wedded to the weaknesses that have served us so well.

A little protest goes a long way.

A Needy God

Definition of God: That entity which is perfect, complete, unlimited, utterly above our onception, and, according to those who claim to know Him intimately, in urgent need of our agreement that He is.

[That's a smart-assed definition, since many tell us that it is we who need to know His presence. But certainly the impression given by many of the faithful is that the God they worship insists on being acknowledged. Odd how exactly the God each person professes resembles in temperament the person professing Him.

The God I chat with likes to play.]

Critics and Monkeys

It has not yet been determined that any number of monkeys left in a room full of typewriters would, in any length of time, produce a single great work of literature.

It has, however, been proven that a generation of literary critics, left in a room with the production of said monkeys would, in a few years, produce a significant mass of critical literature, analyzing and debating the merits of the monkeys' work.

Having to Have an Opinion

Odd how we are expected to have opinions, how eagerly we seize upon them even where they can lead to no choice of action (SHOULD the Post Office have raised the price of postage, WAS the 1926 Yankee team better than any since, DID Lennon write better songs than McCartney?...).

Odd how, hearing of a game between two distant teams, we feel we must have a favorite - we're like gambling adicts who, seeing two ants on the sidewalk, will bet on which will reach the next crack first.

How is it so few of us have learned the exquisite relief of not having to have an opinion?

A Proud and Free People

"I come from a proud and free people."

Everyone does. All the disgraced slaves come from proud free people and don't know how to go back, but they say this ("I come from a proud and free people") as if it matters, so maybe it does:

Maybe only the free can be enslaved, only the proud can be abased, and maybe we'd have no hope of getting there if we didn't know we'd already been there.

TeenScream

New studies show that if you talk to children about suicide and ask them repeatedly if they've ever considered hurting themselves or thought of suicide as an option, those children do begin to think about suicide and notice that it's an option.

This is what the drug companies call "suicidal ideation" which is why psychiatrists want to screen kids: So that the kids can be put on medications -- as part of their meducation -- that include among their effects, causing suicidal ideation. That way the drugs can keep the suicide rates up (creating a demand for psychiatrists), so that the psychiatrists won't have to spend their days asking questions that cause suicidal ideation.

Then the psychiatrists can get back to their most valuable work: Redefining picking loose eyelashes out of your eye when there's no eyelash there as Phantom Cilia Disorder, redefining picking your nose as the digital phase of Snotophobia (which is not a phobia?), redefining pressing the down button again after it's already lit up as Obsessive Elevator Impatience Dysfunction, etc.

For some reason, no one asks the kids, "Have you ever considered harming a psychiatrist?" Perhaps we should spread the word that children are, increasingly, a danger to psychiatrists. We might recommend that they be screened to detect urges to maim or kill psychiatrists. (I think that's what the shrinks call "Defiance Disorder".)

For more data on the purposes and products of those who advocate screening all children (or all people) for "mental illness", check out this site.

Immortals Are Least To Be Feared

If you can talk to earth and sky and have them answer, you will never be lonely on earth, nor will deaths greatly diminish you; but despite this lack of sympathy for the preoccupations we call "human", you will not be tempted to waste people: Violence is how we compel an answer or at least a hearing when gentler means fail. Even death is a kind of hearing, the one who ignores your words receiving blade or bullet and dropping everything -- he GETS it. But why should you compel human attention when earth and sky listen to you?