Love Is An Attitude To Life

Is there no way out of the mind? SYLVIA PLATH

The way out is never through yourself. MATT HAIG

Another passage from Matt Haig's Reasons to Stay Alive:

Love. Anaïs Nin called anxiety 'love's greatest killer'. But fortunately, the reverse is also true. Love is anxiety's greatest killer. Love is an outward force. It is our road out of our own terrors, because anxiety is an illness that wraps us up in our own nightmares. This is not selfishness, even though people read it as such. If your leg is on fire, it is not selfish to concentrate on the pain, or the fear of the flames. So it is with anxiety. People with mental illnesses aren't wrapped up in themselves because they are are intrinsically any more selfish than other people. Of course not. They are just feeling things that can't be ignored. Things that point the arrows inward. But having people who love you and who you love is such a help. This doesn't have to be romantic, or even familial love. Forcing yourself to see the world through love's gaze can be healthy. Love is an attitude to life. It can save us.

Reasons To Stay Alive

Matt Haig's Reasons to Stay Alive — I very much recommend this book if you suffer from depression or know anyone suffering from depression. And, let's face it, that's most of us. Here's an extract:

Life is hard. It may be beautiful and wonderful but it is also hard. The way people seem to cope is by not thinking about it too much. But some people are not going to be able to do that. And, besides, it is the human condition. We think therefore we are. We know we are going to grow old, get ill and die. We know that is going to happen to everyone we know, everyone we love. But also, we have to remember, the only reason we have love in the first place is because of this. Humans might well be the only species to feel depression as we do, but that is simply because we are a remarkable species, one that has created remarkable things — civilisation, language, stories, love songs. Chiaroscuro means a contrast of light and shade. In Renaissance paintings of Jesus, for instance, dark shadow was used to accentuate the light bathing Christ. It is a hard thing to accept, that death and decay and everything bad leads to everything good, but I for one believe it. As Emily Dickinson, eternally great poet and occasionally anxious agoraphobe, said: 'That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.'

Reasons To Walk The Camino: (1) The Slough Of Despond

This is the first piece in an occasional series I'm calling Reasons To Walk The Camino.

The name of the slough was Despond. JOHN BUNYAN The Pilgrim's Progress

It was another time and another place, and she was younger, but not that much younger. She was old enough to have suffered a little, and to have experienced melancholy, and to have survived this suffering and melancholy. She carried some scars, and some hurt, and some confusion, but she still had faith in the future, still saw the glass half full rather than half empty. Until one day, one quite ordinary and uneventful day, a pit opened up before her feet, and she fell right in.

She stayed there in the darkness for a week or two — or was it longer? Her thoughts were grim, and she tried to push away these negative thoughts. She was almost completely immobile during this dark time. Movement was an effort bordering on torment. Better to remain still, to breathe slowly and regularly, to breathe deeply and determinedly, in and out, in and out. She prayed the walls of the pit would keep straight, as they appeared to bulge, then deflate, and rock from side to side.

She must have eaten and drunk throughout this period, but she cannot remember what she ate or drank. In fact, she cannot remember eating or drinking at all. She did not seem to want to read, or even to be able to read. Noises reached her consciousness only intermittently: snatches of music, mainly Bach, Mozart and Brahms, and some pop songs from her past, Johnny Halliday, Françoise Hardy. There was no world outside the pit, outside her mind, outside her body (which was curled up in the foetal position for most of the time).

Then one day the fog cleared, and she tried to walk, which she did shakily, and she realised she was not in a real pit, but actually in the bedroom of her house, and it was a morning in early spring, and the sun was dripping like honey through the curtains, and the blackbirds were scolding each other and making alarm calls in the garden.

And she gave thanks to the bedroom, to the house, to the garden, to the sun, to the blackbirds — and probably to God and to the Infinite Spirit and to the whole universe too. She gave thanks that life was change and flux and a process of becoming, and that nothing lasted forever, even dark pits into which we might fall. She resolved to avoid these pits in future if she could, and if she could not, then at least she now knew they would eventually dissolve and disappear and change into something else: perhaps a warm room with a bed and a blanket and the sun filtering through the curtains, or even a wood or a forest or a green valley or a high hill or a rocky mountain. Or a path which wound through the wood or the forest or the valley, and up the hill, and over the mountain.

It was at that moment she decided to walk the Camino. And she has been walking the Camino ever since.    

Happiness, Happiness

Incy Wincy spider climbed up the waterspout/ Down came the rain and washed the spider out/Out came the sun and dried up all the rain/Incy Wincy spider climbed up the spout again! Nursery Rhyme

I like to be happy and I like to be in good health. We all do. But it isn't always possible, is it? Normally I'm an enthusiastic kind of person - manic even - but for the last few days on the Camino I wasn't feeling quite myself. I was fatigued and listless and my feet hurt.

I returned home from Santander the day the Spanish weather broke. I waited for the ferry in a dejected mood, hunched over a freshly-squeezed orange juice in a bar near the quayside, watching the rain bucket down.

Back in England the weather also turned cold and wet. At once I came down with a virus - probably transported from Spain - which the whole family then promptly caught. And the slight swelling I'd been vaguely aware of in my gum turned into a full-blown abscess.

But the antibiotics have now kicked in. I've just been for a walk round the village. Yes, today the depression lifted, unexpectedly, joyously, like a ray of sunshine shafting through a bank of dark cloud.

Illness, malaise, fits of depression can be cathartic. If you get over them. A selfishly optimistic point of view, I know. Because some people can't.

(The photo shows the sun filtering through early morning clouds above Artieda in northern Spain.)