Dips

I had a bit of a moment today. In the late afternoon after I finished work. Everything felt very down. Suddenly I doubted my position, my friendships, myself, my work. Sort of the opposite of a euphoric moment. A moment of helplessness, and I wouldn’t say despair, but certainly a feeling of absence or emptiness? It wasn’t very pleasant and as it started to happen I got up from my chair and walked around the downstairs of my home a little bit and I spoke to myself reassuringly and I said, you know, later I will feel better and nothing about my circumstances will have changed.

I think we do that all the time, paying attention to some part of our life or another, we can change the way we feel about our life overall, because we’re not really able to encompass all of it, all of the time. Perhaps you have a really painful relationship with one of the members of your family. When you think about them and your relationship with them very closely, everything else sort of slides into the distance and you can feel some of the pain and regret connected to the loss of the relationship or a misunderstanding between you which you wish could be resolved. Yet, you suspect, because Shakespeare wrote some marvellous plays, most likely won’t be due to the misunderstandings inherent to poor relationships.

Perhaps most of the time, we might be too positive and upbeat about our lives because we push into the distance those things which ought to capture more of our attention. We don’t notice our poor behaviour, our mistakes, we don’t notice we’re not looking after ourselves, or our environment sufficiently, or that we’re not the best of friends to friends who need us to be better.

We know this happens all the time because most of us have experiences where someone will sit down and talk to us and explain that we’ve let them down or hurt them in some way. And often there is a moment of realisation when you’re having these conversations that it is due to some form of inattention or poor care on your own part and could have been avoided had you been paying more attention.

Sometimes the people around us can remind us of the good things. We can become very down and out and then someone comes along and says, yeah, don’t you realise you’re one of my favourite people? Or don’t you realise you did this thing for me and I’m so grateful for it? So there are these swings in our emotional states and our thoughts about ourselves without really changing any of the circumstances. Often these reminders come from within rather than without. As I did with myself, it a process of internal thought which reminds me who I am and where I fit into my own narrative.

Ultimately, when you have a good conversation with a friend and you leave feeling better about things, or if you go to see a therapist and after a session, you feel that you’re a little bit more in charge of your life. If you take a moment to reflect and think and after you’re a little bit more able to look after the things that need care and more able to dismiss the things that ought to be forgotten about, Well, nothing in your life circumstances has really changed. It is your attitude and approach that has shifted.

So I found myself yesterday afternoon in a bit of a slump and I talked to myself and I took a little walk around the inside of the house and I rode on my rowing machine for a few minutes. And sure enough, after a little while my mood lifted and I felt more positive about things, even though nothing had changed about my circumstances at all.

I don’t know if I should be happy about this or disappointed. It is interesting to reflect on the idea that how I feel about my life has more to do with how I am thinking and approaching the facts of my life than it does the facts of my life themselves. Earlier in the week, a friend mentioned Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankel. A book written about the experiences of life in a prison camp. I don’t remember everything about the book, but one of the things I do remember is this notion that some people took their circumstances in a despairing manner, which is I guess how I would imagine everyone would, while others were more positive and upbeat.

One of the reflections the author makes is that personality wins through regardless of circumstance. You have people who are poorly fed, poorly treated, with their friends being killed around them, and some of them just maintain a good attitude are happy and positive, while others are sad. It’s not just the situation, its who we are too.