Real Life Matters

“When people have . . . problems, it’s time to stop asking what’s wrong with them . . . and time to start asking what happened to them.”^[1]Hari, Johann. Lost Connections (p. 140). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

If you tell your physician that you are feeling anxious and maybe even a little depressed, there is a good chance that they will listen politely for a short while and then reach for their laptop. Big Pharma has done some amazing things to advance modern medicine. Promoting a more holistic and nuanced view of anxiety and depression is not, however, among them. Indeed, given the time pressure that insurance companies impose on physicians generally, it is often necessary for a physician to prescribe the latest SSRI than to try to get to the root of what’s happening in their patient that is causing them to be anxious and depressed in the first place. Medication has an important role in our health, but it would be wrong to expect that it can cure our sadness.

The truth of the matter is that many of us are anxious and depressed for reasons that are readily understandable. For example, you may need to deal every day with a difficult boss. You may be at a loss about how to handle a problematic family relationship. You may have a hard time saving enough for retirement or even putting food on the table. Like me, you may have a diagnosis for a chronic disease for which there is no cure. All of us are trying to figure out how to co-exist in a nation stirred up by the media and by leaders who profit from the chaos of our political differences, which seem only to be growing. We make things worse for ourselves when we feel bad about feeling bad – like there is something wrong to feel out of place in a world that has gone mad before our very eyes.

Turning off my phone, I lie on my back on the floor (my favorite place) and take deep breaths. I muster up as much courage as I can find within and lean into the grief and losses I have experienced on the path of life. I have learned the hard way that running from problems only makes things worse.^[2]Pain is necessary. Suffering is optional. Indeed, it is helpful for me to remind myself that all emotions need to be felt so that they can be moved gently through my mind and, especially, my heart.

For the most part, grief is not a problem to be solved, not a condition to be medicated, but a deep encounter with an essential experience of being human. Grief becomes problematic when the conditions needed to help us work with grief are absent. For example, when we are forced to carry our sorrow in isolation, or when the time needed to fully metabolize the nutrients of a particular loss is denied, and we are pressured to return to “normal” too soon. We are told to “get on with it” and “get over it.” The lack of courtesy and compassion surrounding grief is astonishing, reflecting an underlying fear and mistrust of this basic human experience. We must restore the healing ground of grief. We must find the courage, once again, to walk its wild edge.^[3]Weller, Francis. The Wild Edge of Sorrow. North Atlantic Books. Kindle Edition.

Today, during the cold of winter, I walk on this wild edge of grief and loss. I seek to encounter the layers of meaning within my deepest, truest self.