It’s a chicken or egg sort of thing. Which came first – the not feeling so good? Or the excessive sitting and snacking? Did I sit and snack because I was feeling a little poorly or did all that sitting and snacking lead to feeling not so hot?
It’s probably a little bit of both.
One thing I’m sure of is this, like all things, shall pass.
I had a couple of minor physical ailments last week that led to me being housebound for several days. In addition, spring – with it’s new growth and rebirth, is not giving me a sense of hope and joy, but rather providing a sharp contrast between life ending and beginning. In some ways I prefer the cold and gray of fall turning to winter. Wet, cold weather provides us a reason to be introspective, to be inside, not so busy, and to share our closed-in-ness with those around us.
It would be nice to connect with the child inside us, as spring approaches. To experience the pure joy of warmer weather and the promise of play, running, friends, games, laughter and the knowledge that there isn’t too much time until school’s out and we are set free to explore a whole 3 months of summer (how long those 3 months were).
Nowadays I’m less connected to the seasons. There are no long summers, but rather short vacations. There are no days of being outside with friends, until it was dark, or dinnertime and time to go home. Sometimes I forget for a moment what season it is. Being in an office contributes to that, as well as the less sharply defined weather we have in this area – compared to say – Fargo, North Dakota. Generally you have a good idea that it’s wintertime in Fargo. In Everett it can be cool to slightly warm, maybe with a little rain mixed in or at least partly cloudy anytime of the year and often is.
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It’s okay to feel sad.
Giving your self permission to feel is not always so easy. Our culture is set up for happy shiny people. If you aren’t happy you are “depressed” – i.e. you need to be medicated. I would never claim that clinical depression is not serious and that various treatment options need to be explored – medication, counseling, exercise (if possible) and meditation/self-work could all be valuable. The place where I part company is when people try to tell us that we shouldn’t feel sad when things in life are sad.
For example – say someone you love is leaving. This is sad and you might feel like crying, cuddling up with a warm blanket, doing nothing….etc.
Life is about loss.
That’s sad.
We lose our youth, we lose our friends, we lose our family and other loved ones, our health. We give things up little by little until eventually we are left with our self and then give that up too.
We need something to hold onto in the forever-giving up we call life. Some thing, or more precisely some one to give our life meaning. For some it is caring for children, for some a spouse or other relative that needs a caregiver, it might even be a pet for some people. For some it’s a stranger who could use a helping hand. We all know people who find meaning in caring for others.
It’s not uncommon for the caregiver’s health to deteriorate after they lose someone they cared about and for. A wife or husband who dies shortly after their husband or wife died. An elderly mother or father, brother or sister who was caring for a family member and when that family member passed away – not too long afterward the care-giver began to deteriorate and eventually dies as well. I heard a story on the radio about a 101 year old woman who was helping to care for her younger (90 something) brother and sister. The doctor said the 101 year old woman’s longevity could be attributed to her having “meaning” in her role of taking care of, and dearly loving, her younger siblings.
I think the message in this may be that when we look for meaning, and at a more basic level - things that will extend our lives, we get the most bang for our buck by looking for meaningful human relationships. I suppose there are cases of people who lost a job, or a car, a home and then began to physically deteriorate – but I’m not aware of anyone who had something like that happen to them – and then as a result died. The point is that we need to understand our own priorities – ask your self, what’s most important to me? Then make sure that the important isn’t lost in the trivial.
Returning to the point that it’s okay to feel sad, I have to say it’s not just important to remember it’s okay to feel sad – but that it’s okay to feel. Not just important but essential for a good life. There’s a dichotomy here - We don’t want to feel one-way all the time, and if we do – it’s probably time to consult a health care professional. Generally we would seek help from a health care professional for depression. Not too many people go to a Doctor because they feel happy all the time. But…..
It would be just as unhealthy to feel happy all the time as it would be to feel sad all the time. Yet the T.V. the ads in magazines, the pharmaceutical companies and some health care people would like us to believe (and maybe believe themselves) that we should aspire to a life of uninterrupted bliss, or more likely in the real world outside of advertisements - a life of not feeling much of anything - not too sad, not too happy.
I’ll wrap up with a reminder to myself that being depressed, feeling sad, is not the same as depression. Feeling sad is a normal healthy response to life’s sad events, just as feeling joyful is an appropriate response to life’s happy events.
There’s a Christian note here as we proceed through Lent and approach Easter. I can’t think of any other story that turns upon such extreme, and abrupt, changes in emotions - sadness, suffering and death, turns to joy, redemption, and life. I wouldn’t take the Easter story to mean that sadness over death or other loss isn’t appropriate, but rather that life offers us, along with a generous dose of the mundane, the opportunity for peak experiences that may be very happy, or very sad – but all in all lead to a very good, fulfilling, whole - life.
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Postscript - Interluderetreat.com had some questions to help focus your priorities a couple of weeks back. I have included them below.
- What is really important to me is -
- What I have to give is -
- My life is worth living because -
- I still want to learn -
- Living as long as I have, I have overcome –
- Deep in my heart I know -
- What I love most in life is -
