There are times in my life when it’s been easy to spiral and I find myself in a dark place. I wouldn’t call it depression. I’ve experienced depression. This is something different. When the spiraling happens, I find myself in what seems to be a deep pit. It can last a few days or a few weeks. When I’m in this pit, I am bone-weary from life and feel as though nothing really matters. What difference does anything in life make? REALLY? In this pit, I can’t seem to avoid the inevitability that everything I do will ultimately fade away.
When I’m in this deep pit, I’m focused on myself. My only preoccupation is on whether or not what I do matters and whether or not I’m experiencing my day to day life as somehow meaningful. I learned long ago this is an existential crisis. An existential crisis is characterized by the awareness of life’s futility and absurdity. It’s futile and absurd because no matter what we do, we all just end up as food for worms. At some point, after we die, our lives pass into forgotten history. Yes, it is pretty dark, isn’t it?
Yes, it is true that we all move through the same cycle marked by birth, life, and death. For each of us along the way, there are times of joy and happiness as well as other moments of struggle and frustration. The cycles of life don’t mean that life isn’t worth living. Instead, I’ve discovered … or should I say that I’ve learned the hard way … that my life takes on meaning and purpose when I recognize that my life is not my own but it is to be lived for others.
I want to be careful about how I express this. It would be easy for what I’m trying to say to come off as an endorsement for co-dependency, for not valuing self, and living as though others are more important than me. That’s not what I mean. Instead, I am aware that when I have experienced myself as most alive is when I’ve been engaged with others, whether that’s being a friend who is aware of the other’s experience or when giving of myself in ways that help others. At times reaching out to others is found in small acts, like helping a senior who struggled to load groceries into the car or looking at a homeless person as a human being and talking to that person. Other times, it’s when I’ve sat with someone approaching death or holding another who was overcome with tears. Living for others included actions that can be identified as significant to another or they can be quite small. As I’ve learned from my Muslim friends, simply offering a stranger a smile is an act of charity and compassion.
While there’s no evidence that he wrote the famous prayer, the verse that we commonly know as the Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi says it so clearly: it is in giving that we receive. Yes, it is in giving of ourselves to others that we receive something of ourselves in return.
The Dali Lama has often spoken and written about happiness. He teaches that as long as we are alive, we will encounter problems. Yes, there is suffering in the world: our suffering and the suffering of others. But when we care more for the happiness of others, it is then that we discover our own happiness.
How do I stop spiraling down into the deep dark pit? Having learned that the experience of spiraling into the pit is the experience of being overly focused on my own happiness and well-being, I’ve also learned that getting out is to become more aware of others. This is far different from the words of John Bradford who watched a group of prisoners marching to their execution and saying, “There but for the grace of God go I.” For surely, it’s not that I’m better or more fortunate than others. Instead, it’s the recognition that we are all in this together. To be happy, to find life worth living, to lead a good life requires that we each do it with others. My well-being is connected to yours. Yes, we find the fullness of life together. As we find the fullness of life together, we move out of the darkness of the spiraling pit into the brilliant dance which is radiant to behold.
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