At the End of a World

How do we get through?

Photo by Kym MacKinnon on Unsplash

“It feels like the world is ending,” my teenage son said one evening as we were cleaning up after dinner. It was early January, when wildfires were tearing across LA, and a new administration was about to take office and unleash a flood of chaos and uncertainty.

I wanted to reassure him. To stay positive. To say, “It might feel that way, but don’t worry, it’s not! We’ll be fine! Everything will be fine.” But I just couldn’t do it. Invalidating his fears, ignoring the truth of his statement, would have been a disservice to both of us.

Is this truly the end of the world? Jury’s out, I guess. But it is most certainly the end of a world: our old assumptions about how things work are no longer true. That’s a big deal. We can’t just skim over that, slide effortlessly into the next world, without first acknowledging what we’ve lost. (Actually, that’s not true; we can, and we probably will. We are well-practiced in denial and avoidance and distraction and want to skip over the hard parts. The downside of this is, of course, that we will continue to be haunted by the old world until we finally manage to face the reality that it’s gone.)

Maybe you disagree with my read of the situation or think I’m being overly pessimistic. I’m not trying to convince you of seeing things the way I see them. I’m just saying that I’ve been paying attention to the patterns—not just politically but environmentally and culturally—and the immediate future is not looking rosy. Believe me, I don’t want to face it either. But there have been plenty of times in my life when I willfully ignored something I did not want to see—only to be blindsided when that thing blew up life as I knew it, leaving me shocked, angry, and absolutely unprepared to deal with it.

I made a vow to myself this past fall to put that pattern to a stop. And to not perpetuate it as a parent, either; to be clear-eyed about what’s happening, and honest with my kids, so that they aren’t beholden to a comforting illusion. So they can see the world as it is instead of how we wish it would be.

Truth be told, I’m not doing a great job at that so far. I’m fumbling my way through. Because it’s a treacherous tightrope to walk. There’s a lot of fear tied up in end-of-the-worlds, and part of me still wants to protect them from discomfort and potential damage. (On the other hand… I reckon that our propensity for embracing a comforting-but-false version of reality is exactly what has gotten us into this mess). It’s also profoundly unfair that they, whose lives are just beginning, are facing such a turbulent and uncertain future.

So I don’t really know what to do with all of this. As a person, or as a parent. But I know that sitting them down for one fear-mongering lecture, then leaving them to their own devices, is not the way to handle this. I have to get my own head on straight first. I need to understand what it is that I believe, channel my own inner courage—and then I need to embody it for them. Show them lots of ways to deal with the fear and stress and anger they are bound to face, and work those coping skills into our daily lives. Obviously, this takes time and thought and is really, really hard when you are dealing with your own multiplying stressors.

Hard, but necessary.

Did I write this post because I have come up with a foolproof series of five easy steps you can take to solve this dilemma? Nope! In fact, I’ve been working on this for two months, struggling to wrangle my thoughts into some semblance of wisdom but going around in circles, typing and deleting, typing and deleting—and I’m still not sure it’s exactly “right.” In short, the process is messy, so I decided to let this post be a little messy, too.

At the same time, I know that it’s important to “read the room” when hard topics are being discussed. If people are stuck in a fear response, the default reaction is to swing into anxiety that can be quite intense and paralyzing. Either that or to deny, argue, try to logic yourself out of the situation. My read of the room is: most of us are seriously panicked! So I want to be sweet and placating, the peacemaker, the role I have played for most of my life. But this is not a situation where anyone is well served with paralyzing anxiety, abiding denial, or meaningless platitudes. And thus I have struggled to talk about this at all. Because it kind of feels like if I acknowledge that the future’s looking pretty bleak, I’m taking something precious away from everyone around me: hope.

The Price of Hope

Let’s talk about hope for a minute. It’s very much ingrained in our culture to believe that the flip side of hope is hopelessness, the existential ennui that fuels depression and a nihilistic “nothing matters, so why bother doing anything?” mindset. At the same time, we are big friends of toxic positivity, so it feels like we must look on the bright side or else our negative thinking will cause us to manifest a horrible future that we do not want. But by doing this we ignore what is in front of us. We ignore the shadow. We sail right over the present—it’s a way of bypassing what is, a way of putting a comforting shimmer on something that maybe just needs to be witnessed in all its horrific glory.

What if hope is just a knee-jerk reaction, a band-aid on a festering wound? What if what we’re actually craving is something deeper and more nourishing?

I’ve been asking myself this more and more lately. I’m not just pondering it as an intellectual exercise, either. It strikes a chord for me based on my personal experience. Because I have faced the end of a world before.

When I first started working on my books, I was full of vim and vigor, enthusiasm and hope. I was going to be a well-known, respected writer. I would shine my talents into the world and be rewarded with appreciation and wealth—enough, at least, to live comfortably in an expensive city and finance travels around the world with my family. But, alas, these hopes were shattered soon after I published my first novel. Instead of traveling to far-flung places of great beauty, I found myself wandering through a wasteland so barren and parched that all I could see was nothingness. There was no meaning to anything at all. Just day after day of wandering through darkness, wondering what the hell it was all for, why I put myself through this whole publishing thing when no one cared. Death started to seem like an enticing alternative.

How does it feel to be immersed in such a void? Floating in the absence of all you thought you knew, all you had taken for granted, all you thought would last forever. It is a state of feeling perpetually unmoored. Untethered. Lost.

Though I wouldn’t wish an experience like that on anyone, I survived it. A personal apocalypse, a little-death, which ended up removing the presence of certain illusions that I had been laboring under. How I’d been craving external validation so intensely because I was not giving any to myself. How I’d defined success under terms that were defined by capitalist society and thus would always remain an unsatiated hunger, a continually moving target. How my equating “lack of sales” with “no one cares” was actually quite disrespectful to the incredible gift given to me by the muses.

It felt like the depth of my despair was proportional to the intensity of my hope, which had been tied to things my ego longed for: success, adoration, acclaim. And, in that void, hope didn’t even exist, so I needed to reach for something else in order to find my way out. In the end, what led me out was instead a strange inner fire, a quiet certainty that there were important things I was meant to do yet. I needed to stay, for the sake of my family. And for my creative projects, a series of novels that I felt compelled, beyond all reason, to finish. I had a purpose that, as it turned out, would never deliver the glory I craved, but would eventually bring me a feeling of satisfaction beyond my wildest imaginings.

I want so badly to provide comfort and hope to everyone who is suffering. To use my words as a balm, a cool salve on scalded skin. But perhaps that isn’t always the medicine that’s actually needed. Hope may numb the pain temporarily, but it could cause us even greater suffering down the road. (Though, honestly, we all need some pain numbing from time to time. Nothing wrong with that, as long as we don’t get so focused on the band-aid that we lose sight of the festering wound.)

The truth of life is that it can be hard. Brutal, even. There are no guarantees that tomorrow, or any day in the future, will be better and brighter. At the same time, it is an incredible, astounding thing to be alive at all, and to be alive in a time of immense change. Such a thing may feel more of a burden than a gift, but what if you are here now precisely because you are meant to engage with it, and you have an important role to play?

Mental Health in Tough Times

I recently read Viktor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning, a memoir he wrote in the 1960s about his experiences as a concentration camp survivor. Though I flagged countless paragraphs, this is one I keep coming back to:

I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium or, as it is called in biology, “homeostasis,” i.e., a tensionless state. What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.

Even though I know better, I often equate “mental health” with the “tensionless state” Frankl describes. And this pursuit can be dangerous if we build an impenetrable force-field where the scary, triggering real world cannot touch us, isolating ourselves in a comfortable bubble, focusing so much on self-care that we neglect to see how intricately we are connected to all beings. A hyper-focus on our own individual comfort will always leave a gnawing lack, a sense that something is missing. This can drive us down all sorts of troubled paths, because the tensionless state will never bring true happiness or mental ease.

One of the often-cited recommendations for recovering from depression—or for emerging from what Frankl calls “the existential vacuum”—is to help others. Volunteer. Take care of a pet or a child. Tend to a wilting plant. Perhaps, in times that feel so soul-crushing, one of the best things we can do is to tangibly support and care for what is right in front of us. Not in a transactional way, as a means to an end or a tool for performing what good people we are. Because caring for others is caring for our selves.

Frankl speaks of “striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal.” But what even is a “worthwhile goal”? I’d define it as: something that lights you up, that energizes you and brings you joy, and that has nothing to do with ego-stroking or capitalist measures of success. So, striving to build wealth or climb the career ladder or provide materially for yourself and loved ones, while understandable, doesn’t lead to the satisfaction that is needed for optimal mental “hygiene.”

I also think that we tend to get rather grandiose when thinking about our life’s meaning and purpose. We have been raised on hero narratives where anything less than saving the world seems like a waste of time. But small, quiet purposes can be just as impactful as big ones (though it’s easy to miss their impact if you’re only looking for grand outcomes).

Just having a sense of purpose at all provides powerful solace. Frankl observed that the prisoners who were more likely to survive had a driving purpose that kept them going. Once they began believing their lives were meaningless, they were quickly lost. He frequently quoted Nietzsche’s assertion that “he who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.”

Purpose can evolve from day to day, and doesn’t have to be well defined—an overarching theme might become clear only in retrospect. The path to finding this purpose is in following breadcrumbs of joy, noticing the things that feel meaningful and important to you (even if they seem silly or frivolous, even if they are challenging). It should be noted that this isn’t about proving your worth to anyone else. Your life—everyone’s life—is inherently meaningful. You are here because you matter; you matter because you are here.

The Antidote

A few weeks ago I was walking home after work, my thoughts spinning in anxiety spirals after a truly demoralizing week. I was ruminating, worrying—and then I got blasted, just absolutely flooded, with the earthy green smell of one of my favorite springtime flowers, Sarcococca ruscifolia, AKA sweet box. The flowers are tiny but intensely fragrant, kind of like the call of a hummingbird, such a loud sound for something so small.

I looked up. All around me was so much life, springing forth as it does each year, buds forming on trees, sprouts rising from bare ground. Up in the blue sky the sun was beginning to set and a long stream of crows winged overhead, following the crow-highway that runs through our neighborhood.

I wouldn’t say that this moment made everything better, nor do I want to cling too tightly to a spring will come again! narrative, but it just reminded me, I guess. Of the forces that lie outside politics, outside our human dramas. All the life around us that wants to support us, to teach us, to be with us even as we walk obliviously past, lost in our troubled worlds.

And I think that might be, at least for me, the antidote. Remembering this connection to everything and everyone, to larger forces, to the unseen world. Unfortunately, this skill (which may just be essential if we want to survive this with our souls intact) is more likely in our society to be ridiculed than cherished. I’ve certainly had a hard time embracing it myself! It’s also far from easy to access in such a loud, outrageous world. It requires stillness and solitude and openness. But when you feel it, even just a subtle, fleeting moment of it—oh! How sustaining it is to take in that gentle support, and to return it in kind; how life-giving it is to be part of this beautiful circuit of reciprocity, cycling love in and out and back again.

This, then, is what I’m working on, what I’m trying to embody, so that I can transmit it to my kids, and to everyone around me. Things that sound a bit trite when they are just words, but are incredibly powerful when practiced as a way of life. Take care of each other. Remember that your life is meaningful, that you have a purpose (perhaps many purposes). Do the things that bring you joy, even in hard times, for that is what will sustain you. Know that benevolent forces are supporting you always.

I don’t know what’s coming. But I know in my bones that it matters to love and be loved. It matters to feel—and to show—reverence and respect for the natural world and forces larger than ourselves. It’s not about “saving the world,” or trying to reverse or even slow the destruction that is escalating around us. There is so little that we can do on a grand scale. And yet, paradoxically, the little we can do is a lot. It matters to help other people, other beings, in whatever ways we can. It matters to get quiet and listen, and pay attention to what lights us up, because that is the path to discovering our purpose. It matters to seek glimmers of beauty and joy and let them fuel our spirits. This will always matter. This will always be everything.

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ICYMI: Be Not Afraid Cards

Fear is often like a dense fog, making it impossible to see things clearly during tumultuous times. As mentioned in my last post, I’ve been collecting my favorite practices for dealing with fear, and decided to turn them into a card deck! They are available as a free printable, but if you’d be interested in purchasing a printed deck, let me know—if there’s enough interest I might add them to my shop for a limited time.