“Life is hard. It may be beautiful and wonderful but it is also hard.” ― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive
I woke up this morning and my first thought was ‘thank god’. Something feels changed in the air. The sun wasn't just streaming through my room but pouring in with an insistence that until now it has lacked. Instead of grimacing and closing the gap in the window, which I have been doing all month, I opened it wider. And in spilled more birdsong than there has been. Until now, it has felt as though even the birds have been lamenting the wait for the season and the weather to align.
For the last month it has felt like I have been existing in some strange aside to everything else, wedged at the edges of living, as though perpetually stuck beyond the flow of the river, where the water has run stagnant, in the ‘slough’.
My geographical language is limited, so I needed to look that word up. ‘A part of the river that is carved out and there is less flow. Where debris gets stuck’ was what I described it as. I could see what I mean’t clearly in my minds eye, but I couldn’t name it. And ‘slough’ was the word google gave me. Which apparently - and by coincidence- also means ‘a state of spiritual dejection’. Which turns out is an even better description for how things have felt.
Because for weeks now I have found everything hard. Waking up, finding motivation, being in company, writing. All of it. There are plenty of reasons for why; the quite grim side effects of new medication, the despondency of a delayed spring, a bout of huge homesickness, the perilous state of the world, the chaos of the skies. It is a trough that can be easily explained. But explanation is rarely a balm. Understanding and feeling are so often decoupled, living at odds with one another. Only rarely might we successfully apply a rational solution to an emotional problem. And anyway, troughs don’t always need explanation. They are part of the way of things.
Whilst we might not ever invite them in, there is no avoiding difficult times. The first of the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths- immutable facts about the way of the world- is ‘Life is Suffering’. It was the very first teaching that he gave when he reached enlightenment, under the Bodhi Tree in Bodhgaya more than 2500 years ago. At first it might sound depressing. The uninitiated have criticised Buddhism for as much. As though what they are suggesting is that life is one unending misery; suffering followed by suffering followed by more of the same. But of course, that is not it at all. What the Buddha meant was that whilst life won’t be hard all of the time, it will be sometimes. And it will be for everyone. That no matter who we are and where we come from, no matter what the luck of our births or the qualities of our character, hard times will befall us all. That perpetual happiness is just a myth, and as a result, a good life is not one where we seek to be happy all the time, but rather, where we seek ways to cope with the times when we are not. That we find ways to deal with the discomfort. And whilst there are plenty of ways to soften things- and if you happen upon a balm then absolutely use it- the solution almost always lies ultimately in our thinking.
When my children were little one of their favourite books was ‘We’re Going on a Bear Hunt’. It was one of those books that with enough repetition even the youngest child could chant along to. In the story whenever the family came to a block in the path- a forest, a river, long grass- the solution was the same. ’We can’t go over it, we can’t go under it, we have to go through it.’ For some strange reason, that sing song phrase that has always come to me when I come across a patch of the uneasy. When I feel as though I have hit a headwind. When as hard as it is, and as resistant as I feel- and my goodness I have felt resistance this time - I know deep down that the only way is through. Because alongside the fact of suffering, is the more blessed fact of its transience. The fact that -as the stoics have always counselled and my father-in-law always says- ‘This Too Will Pass’.
It is a fact that is easier told than lived through, of course. One of the qualities of a difficult time is how entrenched it often feels. When we are deep in despair we can struggle to imagine that we might ever not be. The notion of a before or an after can feel impossible to conjure up. And distraction- such a thief of the good- can feel strangely out of reach when life has taken a harder turn. Emotions are the necessarily visceral cousins to our thoughts which makes the experience of them so wholly vivid. And engrained. Anything other than what we are feeling we know in the moment only by name. Which means when we are sad and struggling, happiness can feel like something that might only ever happen to someone else. But the vagrancies of the mind are like those of the weather; mutable, transient and ever changing. The change can often take longer than we might like. Pablo Neruda was wrong when he said that spring cannot be delayed. It can be. It has been. But change is embedded in everything. As deep as DNA. And oftentimes, our best and only option is to wait long enough and with enough patience for the thankful inevitability of it all.*
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This is a poem that I have read to myself each morning now for some weeks. It has been a source of solace for years now. And is something I turn to whenever things are hard. But this morning feels the first in many that I know it’s last stanza to be absolutely true.
“This is the time to be slow,
Lie low to the wall
Until the bitter weather passes.
Try, as best you can, not to let
The wire brush of doubt
Scrape from your heart
All sense of yourself
And your hesitant light.
If you remain generous,
Time will come good;
And you will find your feet
Again on fresh pastures of promise,
Where the air will be kind
And blushed with beginning.”
― John O’Donohue
To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings
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Sunny in Sussex today thank heavens!