Here’s an uplifting thought.
Many people only want to hear happy stories. One with a happy beginning, a happy middle and happy end, please. I am sure there are plenty of people who can handle darkness without panicking, but I think they’ve pulled back from the world. Because the “We demand happy!”-people have overrun the world. The happy-happy-people have shaped our current society and have taught us to push away the darkness, to stuff it down. These people get really really upset when something bad, mean, unwanted or nasty happens. Things shouldn’t be that way! The world ought to be a happy place. And the more they demand happy, the more the darkness wells up, have you noticed?
What to do when you have a lot of darkness in your life? And perhaps a lot of darkness in your soul? The unprocessed griefs, resentments, fears and angers. Own it. And by that I don’t mean burn your life to the ground in bitterness. I mean to stay upright, as best as you can, to carry all the things you are carrying and not to shrink away from them. Tell the story to yourself. Open the book. Read it. Cry. Shiver and shake. Don’t worry that your story might have a bad beginning a bad middle and a slightly improving second half but who knows where it might go from here. Don’t let the “helpers” get upset when you have nothing but darkness to process. The paradox of people who want to help from an unhealthy starting point, is that they demand improvement from you, linearly. It is they who can’t bear the darkness, and they want to pull you out as quickly as possible. As a result from all the pressure, you want to pull yourself out as quickly as possible. Here’s secret ingredient X: Stay in the dark for a while, for exactly as long as you feel it takes, this time around. Learn to live with the darkness, to grope around in the pitch black, not knowing where life will lead you. Accept that there will always be dark. Accept that you will die. There is an art to it. It is the art of being able to bear whatever life throws at you.
Here’s the thing: You are the light. Your intelligence, your consciousness, is what illuminates the darkness. You don’t make the darkness go away. Darkness never goes away, because if it did, so would the light. Instead, it’s more like an ocean. Sometimes waves of light, sometimes waves of darkness. When we’re not very skilled at this yet, when the darkness comes, it feels like there has never been any light and never will be. When you are suffocated by darkness, when there is not an exit in sight, you can learn to hold still. By holding still, you hold on to your own light. Don’t let the darkness blow out your candle. Don’t let the panicky people insist that you should get up, get up and get going and act happy again. Cradle your flame. Curl yourself around your inner flame. And don’t do anything about the darkness around you, until you know what the darkness is telling you. Many people can’t bear that, but that’s their problem, not yours. Your task is to just be able to tolerate the darkness for however long it takes for the light to illuminate something. Without having to change anything while you have no insight yet. Don’t anxiously start doing things to make the darkness go away. Don’t insist that it must. And yet, don’t expect the darkness to never go away. It’s a paradox: Accept that you might be there forever, knowing that once you have fully accepted that right now it feels like you’ll be like this forever and once you have accepted the possibility that it might indeed be like this forever, then an insight will come. And the darkness will pass again. You’ll get up again. And continue with your day. You won’t stay in the darkness longer than needed. But exactly as long as you need to be.
That means that on some days you tell a happy story, and on some days the story is sad. But if you can let the darkness do its job, no matter how much darkness is in your life, the story could be good. That is, not an easy story, not a carefree one, but a narratively satisfying one. Keep at it, and you’ll start to see patterns in own your life that a “rational” person will discard as superstition or insanity. And that’s when the story gets really good. That’s when you can start to learn to ride the wave, the narrative of your own life.