Directive

I’m so busy these days with work. And my head seems empty. They say a busy person is a happy person. That ain’t necessarily so, though. I seem to have let myself gradually sink into a sea of despond. Self-pity is a terrible thing. This is not an entirely new sensation, of course. Over the years I’ve been hit with it innumerable times.

Years ago I remember sitting on the ferry to Hornby on a beautiful summer evening, on my way to the Thatch Pub to meet a friend. The sun shone on the water making diamonds on the surface. The sky was blue, the weather warm. I became aware of a different climate entirely positioned directly over my head. My private climate was more like something out of Wuthering Heights, and I was made aware of it, in a conscious way, because of the dramatic contrast between the beautiful reality of my situation, and my appalling inner reality. Something is wrong, I thought.

All through my 20s poetry was a relief and comfort during fits of gloom and despair. Somehow, it’s comforting to know that others, shared one’s feelings. I would cry and wallow in gut-busting misery for a few hours, and then snap out of it. I haven’t turned to poetry in years, but just now, when I started this piece, as I sat with an empty mind gazing at a blank electronic piece of paper, a line floated up to me from I knew not whence, “Back out of this now too much for us.” Googling the words, I came upon Directive by Robert Frost. It’s a very long poem that happens to have those words as the first line. Isn’t Google marvelous! I never would have found the poem on my own.

The second line reads, “Back in a time made simple by the loss of detail.” Childhood memories are my second line of defense against gloom. I pity those without fond childhood memories to look back on in times when emotional support is needed. But even my nice childhood is a bit of a landmine-strewn field and I must pick my memories with caution. It’s dad, teaching me to swim in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, his arms supporting me as I float on my back squinting into the sky. Or mom, opening the bedroom closet door to reveal four kittens in a nest of blankets. Not the myriad failures and humiliations that left me reeling. And the childhood self, the one crying, “No one likes me.” Or “I can’t do anything right,” never seems to completely disappear, no matter how old I get. It’s ridiculous, I realize, and as the thought washes over me, I recognize the ridiculousness of it, but still…

The past month or two, incident after incident seemed to string along in an ego-busting, misery-making beaded necklace. How’s that for a metaphor? One social interaction bummer after another. Then I read my horoscope and it says something like, “Your interactions with people right now may be trying to tell you something. What are you to learn from this?” Perhaps, that nobody likes me and I can’t do anything right?

A walk in nature is restorative. I’ve just taken one. The proverbial counting of one’s blessings is another nostrum supposed to work. It is designed to shame you out of the self-pitying mood. Self-pity can become a bottomless pit. It can provide a perverse type of comfort. The comfort of the dark side. This is not good. Once fallen into, the sandpit can take some getting out of. Not to be recommended.

How do you, gentle reader, cope with these dark moods? What finally drags me out of it, just as I am sinking and settling in as if to stay for a while, is my partner. He has very little patience for me when I’m like this. I suppose it sets him off, as well, and that’s usually the beginning for me of a sea change in attitude, first, his refusal to let me wallow in it, then his anger. If that doesn’t work he slides into the pit as well. That is finally my wake-up call. We can’t both be down at the same time, can we? One of us needs to remain standing. There is a life to be lived. Two of them, in fact.

Ah, it’s not a barrel of laughs, this growing older. If it’s not the taunting face in the mirror, it’s the lack of fresh horizons, the narrowing down of scope, choices, opportunities. Youth was difficult, but at least you had the feeling that life could turn on a dime. It still can, of course. But not in a good way.

Or, as poet Phillip Larkin says in, “Next, Please”, and to paraphrase,
“Always too eager for the future, we pick up bad habits of expectancy. Something is always approaching; every day, till then we say.
We think each ship will heave to and unload all good into our lives,
all we are owed for waiting so devoutly and so long.
But we are wrong. Only one ship is seeking us…”

Now that I’ve got you all approximating my present mood and wailing into the bed sheets, let me make it plain that I do believe there’s value in dark moods. They give an emphasis to the good times and they help define what makes us human. We are not robots, after all, not yet, anyway, and our feelings are important, to ourselves, if to no one else. Like our moments of exaltation and joy, dark moods bring a religious feeling to us, and let us know we are indeed alive. Pinching is not necessary.
And, I do believe, I’ve just about written myself out—of—this—one. Well, I’m off to my yoga class, then to have coffee with a friend. Hope I haven’t transferred the gloom too badly. And…, do have a nice day. Humour, the flip side of despair!