A friend, on hearing the (working) title of my book manuscript, Disordered Desire: the path through the intersection of bulimia, diabetes and domestic violence, said, “Maybe go easy on morbid /sad subjects.” He also said this after reading some of my essays.
I thought the same thing many times myself, Do I focus too much on the sad and difficult? But to talk about a good thing without acknowledging the tough thing that often lies beneath feels like lying to me.
I come by this tendency to share litanies of the negative honestly. From my glass-half-empty family and my mother. She covered a shortlist of topics again and again: abortion (against), nuclear holocaust, THE Holocaust, WW II and Nazis, and after 1980, my father’s single marital infidelity. She stoked the fires of that last grievance for forty years until her death. In the initial weeks and months after he admitted to it, she called me to vent. They were’t conversations. She dumped her rage all over me, in part because I was her only daughter, but I was also the only person willing to listen, until the day I wasn’t, and told her to stop.
Occasionally I catch a momfluencer on Instagram with perfect children in outfits made of organic wool from sheep named Meadow and Dandelion. We know at least one of the five perfect children had a meltdown off camera, and that she stifled an impulse to throw them into the pond in the background of her perfect life.
In the cacophony of people hawking curated lives, the following feels like a reassuring clarion call from real life.
The world is at least fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative estimate, though I keep this from my children. For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird. For every loved child, a child broken, bagged, sunk in a lake. ~Maggie Smith from her poem “Good Bones”
But I am trying to at least notice the good thing and give it time to sink in.
Rick Hanson, psychologist, meditation teacher and author of many books including, Buddha’s Brain, says “[the] brain is like Velcro for negative experiences but Teflon for positive ones.”
“To survive and pass on their genes, our ancestors needed to be especially aware of dangers, losses, and conflicts. Consequently, the brain evolved a negativity bias that looks for bad news, reacts intensely to it, and quickly stores the experience in neural structure. We can still be happy, but this bias creates an ongoing vulnerability to stress, anxiety, disappointment, and hurt.”
“Taking in the good is not about putting a happy shiny face on everything, nor is it about turning away from the hard things in life. It's about nourishing well-being, contentment, and peace inside that are refuges you can always come from and return to.”
~two quotes from Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence by Rick Hanson, psychologist and author
I write about how I persist despite old feelings of being left out, alone and abandoned, despite falling in and out of depression, because after many years of not noticing, this path of paying attention reminds me I am part of something immutable, joyous, and loving.
“It’s a remarkable fact that the people who have gone the very deepest into the mind—the sages and saints of every religious tradition—all say essentially the same thing: your fundamental nature is pure, conscious, peaceful, radiant, loving, and wise, and it is joined in mysterious ways with the ultimate underpinnings of reality, by whatever name we give That.”
~Rick Hanson, Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom
Meditation and mindful attention kept me from jumping into the abyss. And so did relationships with friends, family, and other supports, but I did not always nurture them. I believe I care about nurturing them now because of my (imperfect) dedication to paying attention.
It awakens the joy I used to know, namely, I am not alone in the universe. I am the universe. We are all the universe.
Nothing you can make that can't be made.
No one you can save that can't be saved.
Nothing you can do, but you can learn how to be you in time.
It's easy.
All you need is love.
All you need is love.
All you need is love, love.
Love is all you need.
~Paul McCartney and John Lennon, from All You Need Is Love lyrics © Sony/atv Tunes Llc, Shapiro Bernstein & Co Inc, Mpl Communications Inc. **Valerie is a writer, editor and published Random House author. **She's a leadership coach and mindfulness teacher, helping clients develop the attention and self-awareness needed to navigate challenges in life and work. **To hire her for writing projects, to teach mindfulness groups, or to explore coaching, message her here.
Valerie, I love what you say in this post. It is rich with truth, the acknowledgment of suffering, and the will to be present to the joys as well as the sorrows. Thank you.