Spam Filter For Your Brain - Episode 112
I've been thinking a lot lately about how many people I hear talking about how things have been so hard since the beginning of the pandemic. It's rare that I meet someone who doesn't have something really big going on in their lives, and things just seem to be a lot more difficult until that sort of rupture in the fabric of everything that we knew. And some of us are still very much living in it and with it. And some of us are still grieving the loss of what it did to the people around us and our own lives. And some of us have gone through a phase of wanting to pretend like none of that existed and have rushed back to a world where we've kind of buried it all and pretended like it wasn't that much of a big deal. Whilst we collectively went through a tremendous amount of loss grief and uncertainty.
I don't think most of us have dealt with that level of uncertainty in our lives or our existence before. And I think what that did to our nervous system is probably worth acknowledging to whatever degree that you feel is comfortable, rather than not trying to dig up things that. That you want to keep buried, but also to be able to process things in a way that means that they don't come back to bite us later on.
And this leads to a thought that I have been hearing and has been sort of bouncing around on the waves a bit. And that's the thought that it doesn't get better. That after something really hard has happened, that there is a stopping in the narrative, and we pause in this place of grief and sadness and loss, and that's where we're gonna stay forever. And this isn't just another little podcast saying "nothing ever lasts forever. We don't know what's gonna happen in the future. Cheer up, love." It's not my vibe.
What I wanted to offer you today is if this is somewhere that you feel is appropriate in your life, that you've got this going on, or maybe you can keep this in your pocket for a day. Where it might be useful is that there is no magic cure to escape all of the things that we experience as humans and land up in a land of happy. We are not living in an existence where if we make the right choices, do the right things, and are the right people, we're going to end up with a monotone, one-emotion ride for the rest of our lives. That is us winning the prize of happiness.
Because life involves a huge amount of experiences that are going to evoke different emotions for us, we're going to continue. No matter who we are, what we do, or how we play the cards, we will continue to experience boredom, sadness, frustration, grief, elation, confusion, and a thousand other emotions in between.
I don't know about you, but I actually want my life to be granular. It's not that I'm here like some kind of saint going. I accept all of the sadness that life throws at me, and aren't I the ultimate Buddhist? But what I do know is that I do want an element of contrast. I want something to be able to compare my happiness to. Also, I want to be able to have a familiarity, a language, and an ability to be able to connect and work my way through big emotions I can have to big emotional stuff. So I don't resent knowing what grief feels like because there are going to be points in my life, forevermore, where I do experience grief. I'm going to have loss of family members, I'm going to have loss of friends, I'm going to have loss of relationships and things that I hold really precious in my world. I want to have some understanding of what these things are. So I'm not learning them on the job, each time, because the amount of learning I've done so far with some of these big emotions serves me well each time I visit them.
I know grief. I'm able to understand some of the cycles, some of my responses. I'm able to be able to see where some of this stuff leads to and some of the roads that I don't want to go down. I absolutely don't want to have to be learning this stuff time and time and time again as if it were fresh. God, it'd be like going through adolescence every single day. Some things we don't need to revisit.
And it's not that I think I've learned everything that there is to learn, but each time one of these feelings comes up, I feel like I learn a little bit more about it. It's like welcoming a visitor into your house that you don't necessarily wouldn't have chosen to have at your dinner party. But you know them. You know what their habits are. You can see some of the mess that they leave behind them in the trail of destruction. And sometimes, if you're really lucky, you can avoid some of the traps that they set for you around the place.
I want to be able to feel my big feelings. I want to be able to know when I spot frustration brewing, work out how I'm treating myself in this situation, and whether, frankly, I'm going to make it worse or not, I want to know that I am allowed to experience boredom as a human. And actually, quite often, that's where some of my creativity comes from. I want to know what it feels like to be able to experience hardship so that I have that very specific vocabulary that is going to be able to reach out and touch someone who is also suffering and be able to make them feel held and seen in a way that perhaps they haven't been able to in any other circumstances.
There is an old Buddhist idea that one of the reasons why we go through suffering is so that we can come back and support people who are going through similar things. And I love this idea. It kind of aligns so much with my heart, in the heart of what I see activism is, that none of us are moving forward unless we're all moving forward. No one's getting left behind on my watch is really what my heart says. Whenever I go through something really tricky, it teaches me more about how to support people who feel like this. Not so that they don't have to, but so that they just know that they're not always doing it alone. And on those moments where it feels too heavy that they can lean back and that there are some people there who would just greet them with love and not try and take it away will allow them to have their own experiences. Not trying to helicopter-parent them, but allow them to just not hit the ground quite so hard that there is a cushion there. And that cushion is love and empathy.
And that's what I believe going through all of this stuff does. So, although it may not feel like it gets better, what it does is it grows me, it connects me, and it makes me feel like going through some of this hardship is exactly why life is worth living and how communities get built. I quite often lean into the beautiful words of Mary Oliver of "Tell me what it is that you plan to do with this one wild and precious life".
I leave that thought with you this week, and if you'd like to tell me what you'd like to do with your wild and precious life. I always love hearing and receiving emails that I get back from thoughts that have bubbled up from things that people have listened to on the podcast.
So do feel free to drop me an email. I'll speak to you next week.
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