I’ve been thinking…

We live in time bound by history confined by illusion hampered by ignorance and arrogance. We seek meaning in knowledge or dogma forgetting that meaning is ours to create or change or destroy. We encounter life through our senses dealing with what is just in front of us since nothing else is real.

Lately I have been struggling with sadness, a pervasive heaviness weighing down my spirit and my body. In particular I am struggling with compromised wishes and dreams, and the grief arising from the fact that the life I would like is not to be had in the current circumstances. Additionally I feel a tinge of shame, or guilt, for being sad over things as ephemeral as ritual (my wedding, and how circumstances are forcing its occurrence) while half a world away, people are grieving the loss of life, of loved ones, of the world they knew. At the same time, I try to create within myself a safe place to allow and accept myself in all my humanity. Because while some of my concerns and feelings arise from ego-driven, petty ideas, they are part of my life, my experience. This is what is real to me at the moment. Bill Bryson captured this in his book about America. He was driving through Toiyabe National Forest, which at the time of his journey was a wasteland of ash and charred stumps. He wrote:

I had never seen such devastation — miles and miles of it — and yet I had no recollection of having read about it. That’s the thing about America. It’s so big that it just absorbs disasters, muffles them with its vastness. Time and again on this trip I had seen news stories that would elsewhere have been treated as colossal tragedies — a dozen people killed by floods in the South, ten crushed when a store roof collapsed in Texas, twenty-two dead in a snowstorm in the East — and each of them treated as a brief and not terribly consequential diversion between ads for hemorrhoid unguents and cottage cheese. Partly it is a consequence of that inane breeziness common to local TV newscasters in America, but mostly it is just the scale of the country. A disaster in Florida is regarded in California in the same way that a disaster in Italy is regarded in Britain — as something briefly and morbidly diverting, but too far away to be tragic in any personal sense.

If you’re feeling blue, remember we are in the darkest days of the year, and we have just come off a holiday season. You may be experiencing sadness because you had a wonderful time and now it’s “back to the grind,” or you might be sad because you had a terrible holiday season. Either way, you feel what you feel. Something I learned at the Centre is how much “comparison grief shopping” we do, and how destructive it is. Just because someone else’s pain may seem more tragic does not mean yours is unjustified. Grief is its own experience. Each person experiences it uniquely; comparison and the subsequent judgments we make (of ourselves or others) is useless. Even destructive.

So, I permit myself to feel sad that I cannot have life as I want. I feel sad that my future father-in-law is terminally ill — the implications of this are multi-faceted. I feel grief for those in Asia who have suffered horrendously. Even if my grief is abstract — not deeply, personally, rivetingly felt — it is genuine.

I realize that I touched on this in the post from the other day. Obviously I am working through something. Themes ebb and flow in our lives.