Rocks of Despair.
The day after writing my piece on slower is faster, I found myself mired in hopelessness. I woke later than I wanted, having slept through my alarm. I felt grumpy and out of sorts, and wrestled with negative self-talk about grumpiness. Not allowed. Get over yourself, pick yourself up, and get moving. Sheesh.
I moved to my desk to attend the third of 3 webinars on appreciative resilience. I like to finish what I start, and since I had committed to this webinar, I wanted to attend even if I had yet to get dressed or fix hair or do anything to take my appearance beyond the honest state of just having rolled out of bed.
Days 1 and 2 were on despair and hope, respectively. Day 3 focused on forgiveness. Taken together, these are 3 elements in the model of appreciative resilience offered by Jeanie Cockell and Joan McArthur-Blair. I found their use of metaphors particularly helpful in illustrating the concepts. Despair happens, like an unwelcome house-guest we must abide. Hope comes in connection to the small strengths that uplift (something of beauty or care or justice) and which provide some “why” for living. Hope is an intentional, conscious practice in the face of despair.
Forgiveness was compared to a bag of rocks that we carry, like the despair, that we choose to release. Perhaps we set them down, or perhaps we build a bridge with them.
In my despairing state, I found hope in this work being freely shared and hope in the nearly 80 people participating in affirmative work. I saw my participation as a good opportunity to practice some forgiving self-compassion – I may be grumpy and disheveled, but I got myself here.
Zoom started, camera off, and all was fine until I realized we were going into breakout rooms to talk about our experiences of forgiveness in this time of Covid-19. Camera would need to be on… I don’t know how to connect to forgiveness in this moment… do I just quit now? The urge to quit and run was almost overpowering. But I stayed.
I admitted to the 2 gentlemen with whom I was grouped, both men whose work I had seen circling the higher levels of positive psychology and appreciative inquiry, that I was unclear how I connect practicing forgiveness with resilience in this experience of Covid-19. I asked to listen to their ideas so I may learn from their expertise. Rolla Lewis offered recognition of privilege, and lifescaping as a continuous practice of cultivating the life you want to live. Michael Emmart offered the choice to connect over protect, moving from our primal reactive selves to be more generative and curious in interactions with others. Responding with a spirit of forgiveness in difficult conversations.
I am so glad I didn’t cut and run. Also glad for grainy pixelated video conference images and large sweatshirts.
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I have been mulling over these metaphors for resilience, despair, hope, and forgiveness. In what ways is resilience like carrying a bag of rocks that weigh you down, dumping the rocks over the cliff rather than jumping off the cliff? Or is resilience more like using the rocks to build a bridge from despair to hope? Or perhaps we use the rocks we have been carrying to fill in the holes and gaps that threaten to make us fall further and again into the pit of despair? What the hell are these rocks anyway?
The rocks are life experiences and all that we attach to them – our thoughts and feelings and stories that make them heavy to the point of becoming unbearable.
But metaphors can only get me so far. Seeing them is not the same as acting on them. Thus resilience is a continuous practice of pulling the rocks out and looking at them and changing the way I see them until they no longer burden me. And I am honestly not sure it’s really possible to let them go, though the idea, the possibility, inspires me to keep trying. I guess that’s hope.
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Embrace the sand.
I have other rock metaphors that I carry with me.
One of the best pieces of advice I ever received was “embrace the sand.” I was privileged to be on a 5-day rafting trip with my family and about 20 strangers, and at the orientation one of the guides told us to embrace the sand because it would be everywhere, every day, for the next 5 days. We cannot enjoy a river rafting trip and sleep in the great outdoors without sand getting into our shorts, our ears, our sleeping bags, everything. We can let it irritate and ruin our trip, or we can embrace the sand, knowing it is part of the experience.
I would have this advice tattooed inside my eyelids if it would help me remember that even the smallest rocks in life will irritate. Kind of like Shit Happens. It’s more about what we decide the event means than about the event itself, and events will keep happening. Until they stop, when life is no more anyway. And we get to decide if the events are shit or rocks, I guess.
I may get that “embrace the sand” tattoo somewhere useful someday, but in the meantime I have to keep practicing to remember the sand.
Another metaphor: clams turn sand into pearls. Irritation becomes something of beauty. Metaphor breakdown: do clams value the pearls they make? Or is it just humans that appreciate the beauty of pearls? Maybe others enjoy what we make of our irritation more than we enjoy it ourselves. Our pearls provide pleasure for others.
But the Sisyphean metaphor is one I carry the most lately, and for years it continues to haunt me… the absurdity of pushing the rock up the mountain over and over, day after day, only to see it roll back. Pointless, fruitless. Never ending. Camus claimed “one must imagine Sisyphus happy,” for why else would he continue to push the rock? The value and meaning of life is derived from the effort, not the result.
Buddhist ideas are similar in that the first noble truth is life is suffering. Or, like we used to say when we were kids, “life sucks and then you die” with the addition of “and you get reincarnated to live it all over again – karma is a bitch.” [I love Buddhism, by the way; I am sorry if my characterization is offensive.] And our way through this cycle of suffering (in a vast oversimplification) is detachment, with the ultimate release coming in Nirvana… which is not heaven, as many western translations offer, but nothingness. In my moments of despair I might aspire to this nothingness as better than suffering. Almost anything is better than suffering. Except that the suffering is really all in my head… I have shelter and resources and love and privilege. I find it difficult to accept despair in light of all the reasons I have to not despair, to be grateful. Yes, there is injustice and death and pain in the world, even in my world. But really… girl, just get over yourself, pick yourself up and move forward. Despair not allowed.
Nietzsche claimed Buddhism was nihilistic, a will to nothingness. We should instead aspire to greatness, a will to power, and effort to move beyond our limiting human constructs. I may have lost you here, but I’m not going to explore this line of thinking any further. All this is to say that perhaps there is truth inside both Buddhist and Nietzsche’s views: we work through the Buddhist 8-fold path for living both within and beyond our illusory human experience to create a life worth living.
Which brings me back to Rolla Lewis and his concept of Lifescaping. To be completely honest I have 2 minutes of experience with his concept and may be frightfully misrepresenting his work – for which I apologize in advance. But my intent here is only to borrow the metaphor: Lifescaping borrows its concept from landscaping, but instead of cultivating beautiful yards and gardens, we cultivate the life we want to live as best suits our needs and tastes and in congruence with the natural environment. Lifescaping requires an ongoing process of nurturing and weeding and designing for nourishment and beauty. And rocks and weather and destruction and all sorts of other variables come into play, which we work with to build and rebuild and create season after season.
Lifescaping is a beautiful metaphor. For me it is much more appreciative and affirming of life as we know it than is the myth of Sisyphus, who is doomed by circumstance and with very limited agency beyond what meaning he makes of his rock-rolling. To be a lifescaper is to have the agency to create a harmonious life in an on-going process, through the seasons and vicissitudes of life.
Maybe being a lifescaper is like being a Bodhisattva. Bodhicitta. Maybe not – if the lifescape serves only the lifescaper. But I will save this particular exploration for another day.
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Rocks, Shame, and Bootstraps.
You may notice that my instances of personal resilience – where I made myself do what I did not feel like doing – rely on will, on tired “bootstrap” metaphors that deny my experience of despair as irrelevant, rejected as weak, inconsequential, even shameful. Not allowed. You shouldn’t feel this way.
Yet shame doesn’t work. I don’t think I need to write about this here… just read BrenĂ© Brown’s work on shame and shame resilience. She’s got the goods there (and I am ever so grateful to Dr. Brown for sharing her work with the world).
The question is: how do I embrace my turns toward despair? How do I see the beauty and grace, how do I value despair? How do I allow despair? How do I abide despair?
Despair seems fruitless. Futile. Like rolling a rock up a hill only to watch if roll back. Pointless and absurd. But we know sadness has a role to play, just like joy (see Inside Out). We may not choose to feel sadness, but it is part of being human. Sadness offers compassion and kindness. It’s a drag, but it helps us reframe and recognize others. Without sadness we would be detached and unfeeling, uncaring.
The Buddhist practice of Tonglen offers compassion as the fruit of suffering like despair. In this practice, we recognize how we are feeling, see it as a human experience (like me, others feel this too), and we offer to feel it all so others need not feel it. We take it in and breathe out that which other’s need – peace, shelter, ease, etc. Like the self-compassion practices offered by Dr. Kristen Neff and Dr. Chris Germer, in Tonglen we have recognition of common humanity, common sufferings, and an inspiration for kindness.
Which might make life a little less lonely and isolating, if with practice, we observe despair as it points us to interconnectedness. We are part of something greater, more beautiful, worthy of protection and care and love. Despair points us back to hope. Forgiveness helps us release and move on, beginning anew. Again and again… and that is resilience.
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And with this I take a step back from the edge of the cliff of despair and see the rocks in a new light. What shall I do with them? Make a landscaped path? What will my lifescape look like? How will my lifescape benefit others, bring them beauty and ease and release from suffering?
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Some people have called me Rockin’ Robin. I have a new appreciation for that moniker. đŸ˜‰
