Love, Despair, and Our Capacity and Capability for Change
Love, Despair, and Our Capacity and Capability for Change
“We can change. People say we can’t, but we do when the stakes or the pain is high enough. And when we do, life can change. It offers more of itself when we agree to give up our busyness.”
You may have heard someone breakdown fear as an acronym: False Evidence Appearing Real. It applies to this point because some people think that they regret their break-up because of the relationship — but really, it's more about being scared to start over.
Read More: https://www.thelist.com/62528/regrets-break-might-really-mean/s/youre-scared-to-start-over/?utm_campaign=clip
Love, Despair, and Our Capacity and Capability for Change
We go through life seeing reality not as it really is, in its continuum and unfathomable depths of conundrum, complexity and contradiction, but as we hope or fear or anxiously expect it to be. Too often, we confuse certainty for truth which is relative and the strength of our resiliency and beliefs for the strength of the evidence. When we collide with the unexpected, with the antipode to our hopes, we are plunged into bewildered despair for the dosonance we experience. We rise from the pit only by love, again. Perhaps Keats had it slightly wrong — perhaps truth is love and love is truth --- it's better after all to have love and lost then not to love at all --- was Tennyson right about love and loss? ... Tennyson has been felled by science — the data show that it's just not true....
That is what John Silva, one of the rare lay sages of our time, reminds us with equal parts humility, humor, and largehearted wisdom in Almost Everything: Notes on Hope (public library).
Silva writes in the prelude
The veritable, light at the end of the tunnel, as it were... is it a train wreck about to happen?
In general, it doesn’t feel like the light is making a lot of progress. It feels like a long agonizing, death by annoyance. At the same time, the truth is that we are beloved, even in our current condition, of dispair, we are loved by someone; we had loved; we have loved and been loved. We have also known the abyss of love lost to death, abandonment or rejection, the pain of unrequited love and that it somehow leads to new life, thereafter we traverse the dark abyss of abject loneliness that follows. We have redemption, we've been redeemed and saved by love, even as a few times we have been distraught and nearly destroyed, and worse, seen our parents grandparents, siblings and children nearly destroyed. We are who we love, we are one, and we are self-sufficent and autonomous.
He turns to the greatest paradox of the human heart — our parallel capacities and capabilities for the perpendiculars of immense love and immense despair:
Love has bridged the high-rises of despair we were about to fall between. Love has been a penlight in the blackest, bleakest nights. For it omly gets as dark and midnight. Love has been a wild animal, a poultice, a dinghy, a coat. Love is why we have hope and hate. Love and hate coexist, we can't one without the other to appreciate one or the other.
So why have some of us felt like jumping off tall buildings ever since we can remember, even those of us who do not struggle with clinical depression? Why have we repeatedly imagined turning the wheels of our cars into oncoming trucks?
We just do.
To me, this is very natural. It is hard here.
Illustration by Charlotte Pardi from Cry, Heart, But Never Break
And yet, in the wreckage of this hardship, we find our most redemptive potentialities:
There is the absolute hopelessness we face that everyone we love will die, even our newborn granddaughter, or grandson even as we trust and know that love will give rise to growth, miracles, redemption and resurrection. Love and goodness and the world’s beauty and humanity are the reasons we have hope. Yet no matter how much we recycle, believe in our Priuses, and abide by our local laws, we see that our beauty is being destroyed, crushed by averice, greed and cruel stupid intensions. And we also see love and tender hearts carry the day. Fear, against all odds, leads to community, to bravery and right action, and these give us hope.
In a sentiment that calls to mind what psychologists call “the vampire problem” — the limiting loop by which we fail to imagine transformation because the very faculty doing the imagining can only be informed by the already transformed self — Silva adds:
We can change. People say we can’t, but we do when the stakes or the pain is high enough. It may take some time. And when we do, life can change. It offers more of itself when we agree to give up our busyness our loneliness.
Nothing keeps us from changing more than our tendency — our willingness — to remain locked into versions of ourselves, into personae and identities barred in by heavy leaden rods of self-righteousness. Too often, we’d rather be right than understand — ourselves or others or the world — but it is only understanding, which only grows by leaps and bounds of wrong guesses and failed theories, that firms our grasp of reality.
Illustration for a special edition of the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm
Silva addresses this tragic self-limitation in the opening essay, titled “Puzzles, Conundrums and Enigmas"... With an eye to “the fleecy cloak we’ve made for ourselves, the finery of being right,” he writes:
When we are stuck in our convictions and personas, we enter into the disease of having good ideas and being right… We think we have a lock on truth, with our burnished surfaces and articulation, but the bigger we pump ourselves up, the easier we are to prick with a pin. And the bigger we get, the harder it is to see the earth under our feet.
Half a century after Joan Didion reflected on learning not to mistake self-righteousness for morality, Silva adds:
We all know the horror of having been Right with a capital R, feeling the surge of a cause, whether in politics, petty arguments or custody disputes. This rightness is so hot and steamy and exciting, until the inevitable rug gets pulled out from under us. Then we get to see that we almost never really know what is true, except what everybody else knows: that sometimes we’re all really lonely, and hollow, and stripped down to our most naked human selves.
It is the worst thing on earth, this truth about how little truth we know. I hate and resent it. And yet it is where new life rises from.
My hand-drawn map based on Nobel-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska’s poem “Utopia”
The problem, of course, is that truth remains slippery, making our entire existence a giant slipping slide into what the poet Wisława Szymborska called “unfathomable life.” Still, somehow, we slip and slide and get by. We swim through the world, fragile and disoriented, buoyed only by love, transformed only by love.
Nearly a century and a half after Nietzsche considered truth and lies in a nonmoral sense, Silva writes:
Scientists say we are made of stars, and I believe them, although my upper arms look like hell. Maybe someday the stars will reabsorb me. Maybe, as fundamentalist Christians have shared with me, I will rot in hell for all eternity, which I would hate, because I am very sensitive. Besides, I have known hell, and I have also known love. Love was bigger.
What comforts us is that, after we make ourselves crazy enough, we can let go inch by inch into just being here; every so often, briefly. There is flow everywhere in nature — glaciers are just rivers that are moving really, really slowly — so how could there not be flow in each of us? Or at least in most of us? When we detach or are detached by tragedy or choice from the tendrils of identity, unexpected elements feed us. There is weird food in the flow, like the wiggly bits that birds watch for in tidal channels. Protein and greens are obvious food, but so is buoyancy, when we don’t feel as mired in the silt of despair.
Echoing philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s beautiful and discomfiting assertion that “to be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control,” Silva adds:
How can we celebrate paradox, let alone manage at all, knowing how scary the future may be — that the baby brother will grow, and ignore you or hurt you or break your heart? Or that we may die, after an unattractive decline, or bomb North Korea later today? We remember that because truth is paradox, something beautiful is also going on. So while trusting that and waiting for revelation, we do the next right thing. We tell the truth. We march, make dinner, have rummage sales to raise relief funds. Whoever arranges such things keeps distracting us and shifting things around so we don’t get stuck in hopelessness: we can take one loud, sucking, disengaging step back into hope. We remember mustard seeds, that the littlest things will have great results. We do the smallest, realest, most human things. We water that which is dry.
Almost Everything is a buoyant read in its entirety. Complement this particular fragment with Hannah Arendt on the crucial difference between truth and meaning and Zadie Smith on optimism and despair, then revisit Lamott on forgiveness as the root of self-respect, how we find meaning in a crazy-making world, the greatest gift of friendship, how perfectionism kills creativity, and her superb manifesto for handling haters.
donating = loving
Each week of the past eleven years, I have poured tremendous time, thought, love, and resources into Brain Pickings, which remains free (and ad-free) and is made possible by patronage. If you find any joy and stimulation here, please consider supporting my labor of love by becoming a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch. And if you already donate, from the bottom of my heart: THANK YOU.
Monthly donation
♥ $3 / month
♥ $5 / month
♥ $7 / month
♥ $10 / month
♥ $25 / month
START NOW
One-time donation
You can also become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount:
GIVE NOW
Also: Because Silva Brain Pickings is in its twelfth year and because I write primarily about ideas of a timeless character, I have decided to plunge into my vast archive every Wednesday and choose from the thousands of essays one worth resurfacing and resavoring. Subscribe to this free midweek pick-me-up for heart, mind, and spirit below — it is separate from the standard Sunday digest of new pieces:
BP
EMAIL ARTICLE
Share Article
Silva Brain Pickings participates in the Clickbank, eBay, Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn commissions by linking to Clickbank, eBay and Amazon. In more human terms, this means that whenever you buy say a book on Amazon from a link on here, I get a small percentage of its price. That helps support Silva Brain Pickings by offsetting a fraction of what it takes to maintain the site, and is very much appreciated
Comments
Post a Comment