When I was in the depths of a breakdown, my fear of life and fear of death were equally matched. I was scared of the pain of living, and I was scared of the annihilation of death. It seems paradoxical but I was never more scared of death than when I was actively suicidal. And the two things seemed intrinsically related. They were opposites but they were also the same. Fear is compounded by uncertainty and choosing something takes the pain of that uncertainty and turns it into something controllable. It is stupid, really. I wanted to die because I didn’t want to die.
It seems to me that the fear of death, like the fear of anything, is made worse when we don’t talk about it and make it visible. Fears become stronger when we don’t see them. People fear great white sharks, unfairly, because of the film Jaws. One of many interesting facts about that seminal summer blockbuster is that we don’t see the shark fully until we are one hour and twenty-one minutes into the film, which is way past the halfway point. Now there are boringly practical reasons for that—chiefly that the mechanical shark rarely worked during filming—but that doesn’t undermine the point: the shark is scarier for not being seen.
The same, I would say, is true of death. Even more than sex, death is a teeth-grindingly uncomfortable subject for many human beings, certainly those of us living in modern Western cultures. And yet death forms the basis for so many of our deepest concerns.
And it is a part of life. It helps define life. It raises the value of our time here, and the value of the people we spend it with. The silence at the end of the song is as important as the song itself.
Or, as Nietzsche put it: “The end of a melody is not its goal: but nonetheless, had the melody not reached its end it would not have reached its goal either.”
Underwater
We are where we need to be. We have never lived in the past. There is no past. There is no future. There is just a series of presents. One after the other. And although there are an infinite number of meditations and online tutorials teaching us how to “inhabit the present,” we already do this without trying. We always inhabit the present. “Forever is composed of nows,” as Emily Dickinson told us. So being “in the now” is something we don’t have to work at. When we are imagining our future or mourning the past we aren’t in either—we are inhabiting the present, and only the present, because a memory or dream is remembered or dreamed with the tools and texture of the present. It is always today. Yesterday and tomorrow are also todays.
But of course, when we talk about inhabiting the present we mean something else. We are talking about how to actually enjoy the present, free from worries. To actually live it the way we imagine some other animals manage to, without fretting about what is to come, or without scrolling through Instagram until our thumb falls off. To live. To “launch yourself on every wave” and “find your eternity in each moment” in the words of Henry David Thoreau. Though, to be perfectly honest, that sounds a little exhausting and maybe just a tad impractical. There are some moments that are simply going to be a little bit mediocre and unnoticed. The pressure to live so deeply in every moment could also make us feel like we have one more thing to fail at. And the irony for me is that I was closest to finding eternity in every moment when I was suicidally depressed. At that point I was agonizingly aware of being in the moment. And every moment felt like forever. A day was a lifetime. The waves of time I was being launched into were drowning me. I was underwater and I couldn’t breathe.
I would have done anything not to be inside the moment. To be unaware of the moment. To achieve not mindfulness, but total mindlessness. To fast-track into a better future or hitch-hike back to the past.
So, for me, the aim of “being in the moment” is not enough. I want to be sure that being in the moment won’t kill me.
One key barrier to enjoying the present is the fact that a lot of us—me included—are completists. We can’t just sit there basking in being, because of all those unfinished things. Those unanswered emails, and unpaid bills, and unmet goals. How can we just be when there is so much to do?
The hardest dream of all to achieve is the dream of not being tormented by our unlived dreams. To cope with and accept unfulfillment as a natural human condition. To be complete in our incompleteness. To be free from the shackles of memory, and ambition, to be free from comparison to other people and other hypothetical selves, and to meet the moment without any other agenda, to exist as freely as time itself.
I hope this email finds you well
I hope this email finds you calm.
I hope this email finds you unflustered about your inbox.
I hope this email finds you in a state of acceptance that this email isn’t exactly important in the cosmic scheme of things.
I hope this email finds your work happily unfinished.
I hope this email finds you beneath a beautiful sky with the wind tenderly caressing your hair like an invisible mother.
I hope this email finds you lying on a beach, or maybe beside a lake.
I hope this email finds you with the sunlight on your face.
I hope this email finds you eating some blissfully sweet grapes.
I hope this email finds you well but, you know what, it is okay if it doesn’t because we all have bad days.
I hope this email finds you reading a really good poem or something else that requires no direct response from you.
I hope this email finds you far away from this email.
A note on the future
Our anxieties and insecurities, particularly it seems in the West, are shaped by our demand that the future be free from worry. But of course we can’t ever have such assurance. The future sits there with pen in hand, refusing to sign that particular contract.
Alan Watts, a British philosopher heavily influenced by Eastern philosophy and spirituality, reminded us that the future is inherently unknown. “If . . . we cannot live happily without an assured future, we are certainly not adapted to living in a finite world where, despite the best plans, accidents will happen, and where death comes at the end.” So, in other words, if we demand the future be free from suffering in order to be happy, we can’t be happy. It is like demanding the sea be entirely still before we sail on it.
Beware because
Your value never needs to be justified. You aren’t valuable because you work hard or earn a lot or can jump high or have a six-pack or you built a business or you are kind or look good in selfies or present a TV show or can sit at the piano and play “Für Elise” off by heart. Your value has no because. You are the right quantity. You are a full cup. You are worth yourself, and that is always enough.
Ten things that won’t make you happier
Wanting to be someone you aren’t.