Resilience...

These things can exist at the same time: The desire to disappear, to die, to float, to fly, to become one with the air. Young ballet students making a huge beautiful leap forward followed by an unrelated soul crushing disappointment. A view so beautiful that it takes your breath away and tears spring to your eye and a remark so cutting that it has exactly the same effect...a swell of pride at a job well done and a wave of despair which erases all sense of accomplishment. A small child can just move from one to the next. As adults, our emotional state tends to be less fluid. We question and get overwhelmed. I am told that to weather this you must choose moment to moment which emotional state to let rule your world, that one is objectively no more powerful than the other. I am not sure that most adults see it that way, we give each experience a different value. Apparently, this is not the path to contentment.  If you are a happy (read as "good") person you will choose the happy experiences and if you are a sad (read as "bad") person you will look to the harder situations to frame your experience.  The key is that it is all within your control. That, at least, is the story told by all of the new age blogs and books and healers. Just decide to be happy and you will be. Follow the four or seven or ten rules of happy people. Sometimes that works. It does. Sometimes it doesn't. There is often another force at work. There is what lives inside, everything that has come before. Some of that prior life experience is clear and worked through and doesn't get confused with the present moment. But some of it isn't clear and hasn't been worked through. It slaps you when you least expect it.  These are experiences that remain fluid in your being, that reemerge unbidden as unformed images or intense sensations or whispers and bring up a host of emotional reactions.  Sometimes the reaction is fear that bubbles up and threatens to kill you. You know that you cannot actually choke on that fear, on the self hatred that rises in your throat, cutting off the air and making you see blurred shapes and hear the whisper of ghosts.  You know that all you have to do is ride it out. Feel the pain and move on. But, it is going to kill you. This feels certain but it won't. What it will kill is your ability to make that previously mentioned choice; the choice that happy people make, to focus on the positive. So you find yourself in a trap, reliving this fear over and over, unable to find or even recognize the positive choice. As a result you find yourself diminished, damaged, and could eventually disappear entirely.

Damaged people live in the grasp of memory. The world of theater and literature is filled with them.  A Street Car Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie, Merrily We Roll Along, and the more recent August Osage County spring to mind. The stories can be beautiful and can move an audience to both laughter and tears. You can learn about the human experience through these fragile and generally lost souls and be enriched in the process. In real life these people (and I count myself currently among them) are harder to accept and to keep in your life. They can be depressed, stuck, and are often angry in a self deprecating or destructive manner.  I believe that these memories are holes in the heart, black holes that suck energy. The memories can be specific and identifiable or unformed and vague. Either way they manifest as holes; God shaped holes or ex-husband shaped holes, dream shaped holes or parent shaped holes. Amorphous holes that take up space and don't allow for the retention of new experiences. People move in and out of your life. Normal people  possess the ability to refill the spaces that are left when a relationship ends or a dream dies. They move on and find a new boyfriend or lover or dream and start over. Those of us who don't know how to refill them just walk around with the holes in our souls, the memory of the person or the experience or the yearning for an explanation. It is the difference between the person who ends a bad marriage yet is happily dating six months or a year later and the person who is still alone years down the line, guarded and scared and smaller.  A person who sees a possible relationship as a risk that will simply rip them open further and create additional dark matter.

The question is then, how do you change? How do you become the person who can fill the empty space inside, accept the loss or the uncertainty. How do you learn to allow for the presence of ghosts and sad memories and accept the hurts of the past while still moving on? That is the challenge. It looks so simple on paper: fill the hole. Yet, we know how many people do that: alcohol, drugs, over-exercise, food.  Filling those holes with people or love is much harder.  From here, where I sit, it seems impossible. I watch other people move on from disappointment and heartbreak and I believe that I must be from a different planet. The air I breathe does not allow for such fluidity of spirit and soul.  I do not understand how they make it happen. I sit on the sidelines and watch. I watch marriages and kids and divorce and starting over.  I watch careers take off and flounder and resume with greater success than before. I watch. And I wish........

Photo credit: morningmeditations.com