Dear Friends
The best selling category of nonfiction is cookbooks, next is self help. Maybe most of what is published of that type is not for us, maybe it’s even a little dumb at times. It’s sweet though, isn’t it? A nation heartily cheering each other up. I’m less charmed by all the books where we flog each other on how to work harder.
In my book Doubt: A History, I needed a phrase that could be used to indicate Plato’s self-help scrolls, for example, and came up with graceful-life philosophy. Sure, much self-help isn’t philosophy, but much philosophy is self-help, fancy self-help, having to do with the meaning of life.
There’s pain that advice can’t really touch. Wherever you think depression mostly comes from, biological nature or familial nurture, or systemic social nastiness, most of us likely agree that you can’t think your way out of it. Right? Still you have to think something while you are feeling bad feelings, and some things are more helpful than others.
It’s helpful to remember, if you are feeling frustrated with your career, that people on every rung of success seem to obsess about what they haven’t achieved yet. Philip Roth was considered the country’s greatest writer by many and he’d won the Pulitzer Prize and nearly ever other award, but he keenly felt it that his contemporary Saul Bellow had won the Nobel and he hadn’t. Too, one can win the Nobel and overhear people say, “The prize isn’t what it once was. They give it to anyone.” Indeed, the voice one overhears that from may be coming from inside the skull.
It’s helpful to remember, if you have taken a gamble and lost, that losses often get recategorized as necessary steps on the way to something you wouldn’t miss for the world. It can be helpful to remember, when you aren’t top dog, that there are a lot of problems that come with having that kind of bark. And nobody is comfortable around the guy that can actually decide who gets to take a bite.
It’s helpful, indeed, to remember that every era in history has advice columnists, be they doric, ionic, Dear Abby or Dear Sugar. I joke, but the Ancient Romans indeed had Marcus Aurelius whose self-help book Meditations included gems like “The brains that got you through hard scrapes up till this point will carry you through the things you are worried about happening in the future.”
But as I show in The Wonder Paradox, a lot of life-hack advice and suggestions for handling trouble came from religion and not all of it was dependent on the supernatural. If you have shame, for example, religions provide people with something to say and something to do to make the shame go away. Many of the behaviors that are suggested, across religions, have to do with either fasting or bathing to rid oneself of shame. It’s worth borrowing some of those behaviors or at least realizing that bad feelings have been actively managed through history, around the world. The repetition of small poems, often called readings, prayers, or meditations, is also a near constant feature of a shame ritual, and you can pick your own.
Religion was the source of ritual and poems for nearly everyone, for a long time, and all these small interventions hang on the idea of life making sense. Outside religion we have to ask ourselves if the meaningful life is available to us, and if that seems and obvious yes, we can try to ask ourselves some abstract questions about what we believe makes the meaningful life.
When we want to fix what ails us, sometimes it seems nothing avails. But even that gets better with better context. The song, “To dream the impossible dream/ to fight the unbeatable foe” includes “to bear the unbearable sorrow.” If all a puny human can do is give themselves to life with great gusto and some risk, than lose we must, sometimes, and in the end, always. All of us are always losing but if we are awake to the larger context, the human situation, we can survive it. Try this little poem by the great Wendell Berry.
It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
Now we can’t be baffled all the time, but neither should we be so employed. I’m sorry about the metaphor showing that without the impediments in musical instruments you wouldn’t have the beautiful sound, I wish I believed that art didn’t depend on suffering, but to some degree, I suppose that it does. So buck up, if you are all a-stumble, like me, it means that sometimes if we squint, we can see.
Or we can just read a cookbook.
Okay friends, be well, and stay alive, and I shall return to encourage you again.
love,
Jennifer