These Last Few Days
A few jumbled thoughts from a panhandling philosopher
These last few days I have been
tired, exhausted, with no will, indecisive. I suppose it is depression. I would
never think of getting it treated for what great writer, painter, or
philosopher did not in time come to know that sorrow and lamentation, or going
down to the house of mourning was a faithful friend in learning truth. Why do
we imagine that a happy person is well adjusted and a grieving troubled soul is
some horrible anomaly? Is this world such a cheerful place that we can just
smile happily? I suppose so if we ignore the Muslim girl being accosted on a
bus by a man who would kill two people trying to help the young woman catch a
break. I suppose so if we ignore the Muslim men slaying scores in Manchester
and London, including a young Australian woman whose crime against humanity was
her being a nurse and wanting to help the wounded. I’ve felt tired this week
but the truth is these truths that might have led to my sorrow really did not
because they feel so far away and I know my soul is ice cold almost psychopathic
in its composition.
I was feeling down more because I
would love to know if it is time to retire, to write, to live out a next
chapter in my life. I doubt that I am ready and am even less sure if I will
know when I am ready. I know a woman wondering if and how she should go back to
school and get a master’s at a school she wishes to attend, and what if she can’t
because of the expenses or if she starts and doesn’t finish? Such questions
plague her. I know of someone, only from her online presence who feels as if
her career in photography is going down the tubes because the clients don’t
look at her photography but at numbers of her followers and she hasn’t rigged
her following numbers. I wonder if I should retire, go out on a limb, with no
net under me and start a new career when others are giving up careers all
together.
I know a man who has lost his
mother. He wanted to believe faith could save her. He struggled through the
months wanting a few more years. He watched her decline, took time off work to
be at her side. Slowly he knew her time of departure was coming. A miracle took
place. Without machines, the medical staff declared her departed. A distraught
relative told her start breathing. She did. The medical staff wasn’t sure how
to explain it. The recovery was temporary. A few hours later she passed until
that day. But those few extra hours seemed to reassure family members now more
ready to accept her departure. I wanted to encourage him, to say I would be there
for him as he recovered. I wanted to be able to help him through the slow mend
that such a recovery is. Do we fully mend from the loss of loved ones? I doubt
it. What sort of monsters would we be if we mended wholly from the loss of
loved ones? I feel close to being a psychopath. I am sure if ever I was fully
over the loss of my loved ones, I would be one.
This week I had dreams of my sister
and of my mother, both are deceased now. It is a bitter feeling when you wake
up from your memories and know they are still gone. They are in the beyond. The
dream seems to assure you they are not really gone and then taunts you by
making you feel once more with such vivid freshness how indeed they are gone.
In 2014 my oldest brother died. In 2016 my other brother died. At the beginning
of this year my sister passed away. I would like to speak words of wisdom to
the one who has lost his mother but my words of wisdom have likely passed away
as well.
There is a young writer, a lively
soul, whom I have never met but she seems transparent. She spoke of waking up
from a nightmare. I didn’t go into detail but told her I had been depressed
lately and had suffered regarding some dreams. I wanted her to know that
somehow it seemed more meaningful to know this was something with which another
also struggled. She is not depressed often, but I felt for her as she one of
the good online friends.
Tonight I listened to Bob Dylan’s
speech which he gave in return for being given the Nobel Prize in literature.
It was sort of a slow form of spoken word speech, speaking of his influences
from Buddy Holly to other musicians and from those books in grammar school like
Moby Dick by Melville, All Quiet on the Western Front by
Remarque, and Odysseus. He spoke as one who had learned to channel his
influences into what he gave, without feeling the need to understand all he
experienced or wrote. He spoke as one whose life was too short, too fleeting to
ever come up with a meaning for everything. There is something raw and real
about that. We feel our way in life in any search for meaning. That even seems
true for a superhero like Wonder Woman. She had the one in mind whom she needed
to destroy, and when she destroyed him she discovered it wasn’t the answer. Of
course, she is only a comic book character, and an film maker’s vision of our
humanity. I believe in another, in one who wept in Gethsemane for the cup to
pass him by. It couldn’t. It wouldn’t. He had to drink it down, every last dreg
of it.
I might be tempted now to bring
Solzhenitsyn to address us as if he would speak the same way to us as he did to
Harvard when he said, “If man were born to be happy he would not be born to
die.”
I’m okay. I have suffered some depression.
I am okay. I have this sense now that this depression won’t fully give up its
hold on me. You do realize that I can’t understand reality without the sense of
it? The sense of reality is pain filled. It is Pentecost now, and the flame of
the Spirit shows brighter in the contrast of darkness. It is better to weep
than to laugh, for we will surely enter heaven weeping so he might be honored
wiping the tears from our eyes as he wiped the dirt from his disciples feet.
Meanwhile the tragedies of life build up. We pause to bury loved ones. Unexplainable
violence chips away at our confidence in life. Dreaming of the departed haunts
us. Wondering if anything we have done matters, taunts us. We know almost nothing.
Life is fleeting. We lose sight of whatever meaning we thought we knew.
A glimpse of light does shine in the
darkness. We know only in part, actually almost nothing. Divine Revelation, if
we can believe it – tells us we are known and loved. How can I believe? How can
I not believe? It gives me hope, and not just for myself. It gives me hope for
the ones wondering what to do with their lives personally. It gives me hope for
the slow mend as we grieve for those we have lost, and for those who wake up
with nightmares, or realize life is fleeting and understanding is slippery. I
am known and loved is the hope that tells me this is only the beginning and not
the end.
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