"It is easier to learn to be soaked and happy than to learn how to stop the rain."
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours As the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker wrote: “To live fully is to live with an awareness of the rumble of terror that underlies everything.” Fear is not something to be ashamed of. Or, as Nietzsche put it: “The end of a melody is not its goal: but nonetheless, had the melody not reached its end it would not have reached its goal either.” I hope this email finds you reading a really good poem or something else that requires no direct response from you. If we demand the future be free from suffering in order to be happy, we can’t be happy. It is like demanding the sea be entirely still before we sail on it. Beware because Your value never needs to be justified. You aren’t valuable because you work hard or earn a lot or can jump high or have a six-pack or you built a business or you are kind or look good in selfies or present a TV show or can sit at the piano and play “Für Elise” off by heart. Your value has no because. You are the right quantity. You are a full cup. You are worth yourself, and that is always enough. Ten things that won’t make you happier Wanting to be someone you aren’t. Wishing you could undo a past that can’t be undone. Taking out your hurt on people who didn’t cause your hurt. Trying to distract yourself from pain by doing something that creates more pain. Being unable to forgive yourself. Waiting for people to understand you when they don’t even understand themselves. Imagining happiness is the place you reach when you get everything done. Trying to control things in a universe characterized by unpredictability. Avoiding painful memories by resisting a contented present. The belief that you have to be happy. Your problem is how you are going to spend this one and precious life you have been issued. Whether you’re going to spend it trying to look good and creating the illusion that you have power over circumstances, or whether you are going to taste it, enjoy it and find out the truth about who you are. Anne Lamott, Berkeley commencement address. Your worth isn’t something you gain through status or popularity or stomach crunches or having a really chic kitchen. Your worth is your existence. You are waterproof It is easier to learn to be soaked and happy than to learn how to stop the rain. Each of us is born with a box of matches inside us. Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate “You must never wait in pain,” said the specialist, or words to that effect. It was a message I would think of years later when I was suicidal. “You must see to it straightaway. It doesn’t go away by pretending it isn’t there.” Realization I used to worry about fitting in until I realized the reason I didn’t fit in was because I didn’t want to. We don’t need to write piano sonatas, but what we do need is to be immersed in our passions. It can be anything outside of ourselves. A few years ago, I kid you not, I helped pull myself out of a moderate anxiety patch by getting deeply into the first four seasons of Game of Thrones. “Everyone comes into the world with a job to do,” wrote Joy Harjo. “I don’t mean working for a company, a corporation—we were all given gifts to share, even the animals, even the plants, minerals, clouds . . . All beings.” As Harjo herself says, “There is no poetry where there are no mistakes.” ProtectionOnce upon a time I felt pressure not to let people down. I stayed doing work I hated. Went to parties I didn’t really want to be at. Saw people I found agonizingly hard to converse with. Faked every smile. And then my mind exploded. After which I realized it is better to let people down than to blow yourself up. According to quantum physics, the laws of the universe are probabilistic. This means that even among the smallest particles, nothing is entirely predictable. There is always uncertainty and things that can’t be entirely predicted and measured. As Ayishat Akanbi put it, “If you’ve decided your healing is dependent on other people acknowledging their faults you’ll still be waiting in your grave.” You don’t punish anyone other than yourself by keeping hate inside you. Other people are other people. You are you. Blackwell’s Island Asylum, a notorious “lunatic” asylum for women....Have you heard of Nellie Bly? She was one of the most inspiring journalists ever to have lived. Nellie Bly was in fact a pen name. When she was born in Pittsburgh in 1864 she was christened Elizabeth Jane Cochran. After her father died when she was fifteen, she and her mother and fourteen siblings were left with little money and so Bly went out to try and earn some....And her reporting shows how much she appreciated every moment of beauty in her journey. “I always liked fog,” she wrote, “it lends such a soft, beautifying light to things that otherwise in the broad glare of day would be rude and commonplace.”...A testimony to what a human can do, armed with little more than a sharp pencil and a sharper mind. As Bly herself put it, “Energy rightly applied and directed will accomplish anything.” She had resisted every role society had wanted her to fit into and became who she wanted to be. To deny mess is to deny who we are. To see it, to allow it, to forgive it, is to reach a state of what Buddhist and psychologist Tara Brach calls “radical acceptance,” where we can appreciate our so-called flaws or imperfections as a natural part of existence. Pomegranate Much of gossip is envy in disguise. Much of self-doubt is conformity in disguise. “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent,” said Eleanor Roosevelt. Breathe into you. Step out of the shade. Be you in the wide open. The only success that matters is the success of being who you are. Fitting in is fine. But never try and fit in if this fitting-in means becoming something you are not. Become you. Become the person no one else is. If people don’t like you, let them not like you. Not every fruit has to be an apple. It is too exhausting to spend this existence as someone else. If you are a pomegranate, be a pomegranate. Sure, there are probably more people who don’t like pomegranates than people who don’t like apples, but for those of us who like pomegranates they are what we like best. Let it be Get out of your own way. Being yourself isn’t something you have to do. You were born yourself, and you didn’t even have to try. In fact, trying is the whole problem. You can’t try to be. You can only let yourself be. Sometimes as an antidote To fear of death, I eat the stars. Rebecca Elson, “Antidotes to Fear of Death,” A Responsibility to Awe We are so blessed with an abundance of wonder on this planet, and in this universe, that we are numb to it. And it is often only in times of intense crisis that such things become apparent. That we can each see ourselves, in philosopher Alan Watts’s phrase, as “an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.” “Dwell on the beauty of life,” wrote Marcus Aurelius in his Meditations two millennia ago, “watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.” The sky doesn’t start above us. There is no starting point for sky. We live in the sky. Epictetus was a very modern philosopher in some ways. His worldview is probably best summed up by his statement “It’s not what happens to you, but how you react that matters.” It is a philosophy that has been credited with helping people in tough circumstances, from prisoners of war to people experiencing depression. The psychologist Albert Ellis, one of the originators of cognitive behavioral therapy, cites this Epictetus quote as influencing his entire therapeutic approach: “Man is disturbed not by things, but by the views he takes of them.”...Pain, loss, grief, death. “I cannot escape death,” he said, “but at least I can escape the fear of it.” Epictetus, in short, gives us control in an uncontrollable world. The control of accepting a lack of control. The control of response. Experience We are not what we experience. If we stand in a hurricane, it doesn’t matter how violent or terrifying the hurricane is, we always know that the hurricane is not us. The weather outside and inside us is never permanent. People talk about dark clouds over them. But we are never the clouds; we are the sky. We just contain them. The clouds are just the present view. The sky stays the sky. Nothing is stronger than a small hope that doesn’t give up. As Buddhist writer Pema Chödrön put it, “the most fundamental harm we can do to ourselves, is to remain ignorant by not having the courage and the respect to look at ourselves honestly and gently.” Healing means to live in the raw. Honest seeing Ignorance shrinks us. The true challenge we face is to look at ourselves and the world honestly. One of the challenges Marcus Aurelius set himself was “to look things in the face and know them for what they are.” The cure for loneliness Loneliness isn’t an absence of company. Loneliness is felt when we are lost. But we can be lost right in the middle of a crowd. There is nothing lonelier than being with people who aren’t on your wavelength. The cure for loneliness isn’t more people. The cure for loneliness is understanding who we are. As Tara Brach put it: “Perhaps the biggest tragedy in our lives is that freedom is possible, yet we can pass our years trapped in the same old patterns . . . We may want to love other people without holding back, to feel authentic, to breathe in the beauty around us, to dance and sing. Yet each day we listen to inner voices that keep our life small.” (The discomfort zone)Beyond the pattern or code of established behavior. Less coded, more human. Sometimes you can just be and feel things and get through and eat chips and survive, and that is more than enough.