You are something far deeper than your surface. You are something far deeper than your identity. You are not a value that shifts on a stock market of external opinion. You are part of something bigger. You are part of life. You are part of all life. You are an expression of life as much as a dolphin or a lion is an expression of life. You are part of the whole as much as you are an individual. If your individualism manifests itself at the cost of your connection to the whole, you might stumble, but you always have the chance of reconnection. Because life is the way to reconnect with life. And you are alive.
One
Numbers are addictive, because they enable us to measure and compare and quantify while also making us feel there could always be more. And numbers—and comparisons—are everywhere. Social media followers. Body measurements. Income brackets. Age. Weight. Online rankings. Click counts. Unit sales. Likes. Shares. Step counts. Sleep counts. Word counts. Test scores. House prices. Budget reports. Stock market valuations. Numbers, numbers, numbers. And the numbers get in. They make us compare. We compare to other people and we compare to ourselves. We don’t necessarily do it in a negative way. We might want the best for other people. For our friends and our family. But far too often numbers are involved. I think the numbers get to us. Every value is numerical. We become finite and measurable and of variable value. We lose our sense of infinity. Of life itself. Where numbers exist, measurements exist. And measurements limit us. Because measurements take us from an infinite perspective into a finite perspective. Only finite things can be measured, after all.
One (two)
If you truly feel part of a bigger picture, if you can see yourself in other people and nature, if this you becomes something bigger than the individual you, then you never truly depart the world when you die. You exist as long as life exists. Because the life you feel inside you is part of the same life force that exists in every living thing.
Power
The most powerful moment in life is when you decide not to be scared anymore.
Growing pains
When everything goes well, we tend not to grow. Because to grow we need to change, because growth is change. It is generally when we face hard times that we evolve. Often we need to fail in order to learn, just as a bodybuilder needs weight to resist against. It is impossible to grow in a world without struggle.
Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but—I hope—into a better shape.
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
How to look a demon in the eye
It’s easy to want to run away from bad feelings. When we feel sadness or fear we greet them as problems to be instantly solved or dismissed. I can remember that when I was first in the middle of a deep depression, I wasn’t just feeling depressed. I was feeling depressed about feeling depressed. Anxious about feeling anxious. And so, inevitably, the negative feelings kept on multiplying themselves.
The key to recovery lay in acceptance. This was the paradox. To escape depression I had to get to a point where I accepted it. To stop having panic attacks I had to get to a point where I almost invited them. I would feel that sudden heightened alertness symptomatic of panic, and I would say to myself I want this. This is not a strategy you should necessarily follow. And I certainly don’t mean to belittle the horror of a full-blown panic attack. I know as well as anyone how utterly terrifying it can be to feel trapped in your own mind when it is in total freefall. But after a hundred or so panic attacks I realized something about them. They were self-referential. They fueled themselves. I mean: the panic became worse because I was panicking about the panic. It is a rolling snowball of its own making. But if I stopped myself being frozen about the panic, if I melted into a state of acceptance, the panic snowball ended up running out of the ice-cold terror and couldn’t grow. Eventually it would float right through. My mind would watch the panic rather than fight it. A totally different type of engagement.
Sometimes, situation permitting, rather than trying to ignore the panic or walk it off, I would just lie down on the floor and close my eyes and really focus on it. And when you really analyze fear you realize, first, that it is only a natural part of us. And second, that it is the sister of hope. Because both are born from the uncertain fabric of life.
In Tibetan the word re-dok is a portmanteau of the words rewa (hope) and dokpa (fear), acknowledging they coexist and both stem from essentially the same thing—uncertainty. When we analyze rather than evade our darkest fears, we learn that even our largest demons are not as invincible as they first appear. Often, when we stare at them, deeply, they disintegrate before our eyes.
Remember
There will be other days. And other feelings.
Opposites
What would “big” mean if there was no “small”? Opposites rely on each other to exist. In Taoist philosophy, the dualistic energies of yin and yang are opposites but also interdependent. Day needs night and night needs day. The dark shadows in a painting by Tintoretto accentuate the light. The mute silence of Maya Angelou’s childhood led to her determination to use her voice.
In this world of interdependence opposite emotions are also connected. As William Blake put it, “Joy and woe are woven fine.” I know this. Because one of the reasons I love life is because I was once suicidal. I have sincerely known more moments of contentment in my life for having gone through years of hell. I now avoid trying to see myself as one thing or the other. I am not a happy person or a sad person. I am not a calm person or a fearful person. I am a happy-sad-calm-fearful person. I let myself feel it all, and that way I am always open to new feelings. Nothing gets clogged in the pipe. No single feeling becomes the only feeling, if you let it all happen. And the way to let it all happen is to see the value in it all. To see the way the dark might lead to light. And the way present pain might lead to future hope.
Love/despair
Albert Camus said, “There is no love of life without despair of life.” When I first came across that quote I thought it was empty and pretentious and more than a little bleak. But as I grew older the words became truer. My love of life stems almost directly from despair. In the sense that I am grateful for better times having known terrible times. But in a deeper sense too. In the sense that pleasure and despair are contained in the same whole, and when we start to see the connections between all things, when we see how opposites are contained within each other, when we see the way everything connects, we can feel more empowered at our lowest points.
Possibility
The existential philosopher Rollo May believed that we often mistake opposites. “Hate is not the opposite of love,” he said, “apathy is.” He also pointed out that courage and fear aren’t opposites, as fear is an essential component of bravery, and that the truly courageous are those who experience fear and move through it. He was most informative of all, though, when arguing for the compatibility of joy and despair.