You Are Too Old Not To Know the Role of Despair: Finding Beauty in the Terrible
Too Old for This Sh*t: How to Take Your Life Back from an Ageist Society
As we dip more deeply into winter, it feels for some the end of life as we know it. It might be, and…but…
Leaning against the banister in the foyer of this house-that-I-might-lose is a huge, heavy piece of art. It’s the Tree of Life, painted on real papyrus with the traditional materials, a piece I picked up in Cairo a few years back. I had it mounted between glass plates. It’s gorgeous. Today I hope to get it on the wall with the help of my handyman.
We are almost done with all the work on this home, a place I tried to sell a few years back when my company folded. That didn’t happen. I recommitted to this home and spent every nickel in my savings fixing deferred maintenance. The roof alone was $23k. If you own a house, you get it.
Then the election, and the stark reality that if what I count on to pay the bills disappears, then everything I now have will be owned by oligarchs. If. No guarantee, but the if is real.
The uber-rich are on the sidelines, drooling and foaming at their fangs, waiting for the masses of foreclosures and bankruptcies which will most likely happen if all the Federal subsidies end. Even if they are marginally reduced, lots of folks may find themselves camping in their cars.
Too many of us live on the bitter edge. There are plenty of predatory people happy to push us over. That’s not an exaggeration; remember 2008, and who benefited from those times.
So many snacks, so little time.
If you can’t see the humor, you’re in trouble. Sometimes I can’t see it either. When I can’t eventually giggle at the absurdity, the pure sanity of it, I’m in trouble. Trouble teaches, but only if we’re willing students.
The oligarchs aside, and yes they’re real, this is worse.
Those old enough to recall:
We think Venom is after our pancreas, but it’s actually our unbridled fear leaning in for the sweetbreads. It really is us, which is both the great terror and the great opportunity.
When we avoid the depth of our emotions, they own us body and soul.
"And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."-Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.
Being in trouble is part of life. Despair is an essential part of learning to love life no matter what.
Those hours and days I get to sit with the despair, not run from it. As I have written before, despair has a role: building resiliency. Every moment I avoid the feelings, every time I try to sidestep the emotions the fear gets stronger.
Again, doesn’t mean I’m right and that terrible things will happen. I do think that tough times are ahead, sold to us under the guise of “trust us it will get better” as the uber-rich happily Hoover up everything in their path. Like “trickle-down economics.” People honestly believed that if you just made the rich richer, they’d share.
Yeah, they share photos of their new yachts, is what they share.
If too many good people are wallowing in despair, they are too distracted to fight back with all the tools we still have at our disposal.
Is it really all that bad? Well, yes, no, perhaps, probably, maybe and who the hell knows, right?
My parents grew up in the Great Depression of the 1920s and 1930s. They were given to catastrophizing, especially my father. He was fond of controlling the conversation and the people around him through exaggeration and one-up’s-manship.
If you had a bump, he had a broken arm. If you had a broken arm, he had a compound fracture. If you had a compound fracture, he was paralyzed for life.
Then he would go to the kitchen for a beer, with his “paralyzed for life.”
And so on.
I learned to catastrophize from him. It’s a deeply unfortunate mental habit. When things go wrong and you hear a bump in the night, it’s not the plastic owl banging against the house. It’s Venom coming for your pancreas.
That IS funny.
If I don’t hear from a loved one for a few days, OMG they died in a car accident.
At 71, if I don’t hear from people close to my age, there’s reason for concern. Just saying.
There’s that. It does happen, but that occasional truth doesn’t have to paint every single thing in the shrieking colors of imminent disaster.
For the most part, the catastrophe is in my head, and has no basis in reality. Our current and often unfortunate tendency to express our minor traumas in all caps isn’t healthy either. I’ve done it, lived it. All this is pointed directly at this author.
We all get our traumas served to us in full color. Some are worse than others. Some are downright deadly.
Above all, we are offered the opportunity to learn to more deeply appreciate life because of those traumas.
Most of my recent posts have been focused on how to build resilience. Since I may well be dealing with significant changes, some of them potentially disastrous, I am working my way through the worry and doing my best to find solutions.
I have utterly shit days. I have days when all I want to do is crawl back in bed and say fuggit.
Then I have days when I get out of bed and focus, find my funny, and remember that every single thing I’ve experienced to date has prepared me for this. That’s when I can be a Light.
That’s a coming article.
Fellow Substack writer
shares my love of Maria Popova’s The Marginalian. As a Black man in Trump’s America, he has his own difficulties. He wrote recently that during a quiet walk down the street in the otherwise charming Colorado City of Fort Collins, a White woman verbally attacked him, telling him that “we don’t want your kind here.”This good and literary man endures what many of us don’t have to, yet he consistently finds time to offer beautiful work and observations to all of us.
Just like James Baldwin did. Baldwin, with all he endured as a gay Black man, gave us some of the most luminous writings in American literature. It came at great cost. Popova quotes him often, for good reason, as he was visited by despair his entire life.
One reason I love The Marginalian is that Popova spends endless scholarly hours poring over the world’s great works to find something uplifting to help us through hard times.
That’s been particularly true these last weeks.
Popova’s contributions are an example of what I am trying in my own way to offer Dear Reader, albeit hardly at Popova’s level, to deal with what we are all facing. Be a light, be an example, be brave enough to walk into what frightens me and watch the process, feel it fully.
For my own sanity’s sake I’ve had to mute at least a hundred writers whose recent angry comments were like fingernails on a chalkboard. I will stand for anyone’s right to write what they please in a public forum. I wore a uniform to protect that right.
That said, using a public forum to do further damage with one’s words is irresponsible at best, abusive at worst. I draw the line when people complain bitterly but offer no hope, no antidote, no way forward.
Complain, sure, but offer a solution. Tell us what you're doing about it.
Whatever you’re facing, whether it’s failing health, failing finances, failing anything, I invite you to consider the potent invitation front of you.
Failure is inevitable. Guaranteed. How we feel about it, how we navigate it, how we write about it in our own life’s story, that is where we find out who we truly are.
Here’s a suggestion:
Last night I watched Widow Cliquot on Netflix. It’s a fine and mostly accurate story of a young woman who married into the great Cliquot champagne family before it was great. She lost her husband to typhoid seven years later in 1805 at 27. She then went on, during a time when women were most assuredly NOT allowed to be much of anything, to deal with war, frosts, predatory neighbors, grief, embargoes and more.
She completely overhauled the sparkling wine industry forever despite everything stacked against her. She is the reason we have Veuve Cliquot.
There were some powerful messages in that film which were a salve for me, and I suspect might be for many others.
She was an example. We need examples of courage.
She felt the despair and did it anyway.
There is no such thing as fearless. Fearless is foolish. Feeling fear and doing it anyway is courage.
A snippet of Popova’s recent offering is here. I repost it with love and respect for us all:
Oliver Sacks on Despair and the Meaning of Life
Meaning is not something we find — it is something we make, and the puzzle pieces are often the fragments of our shattered hopes and dreams. “There is no love of life without despair of life,” Albert Camus wrote between two World Wars. The transmutation of despair into love is what we call meaning. It is an active, searching process — a creative act. Paradoxically, we make meaning most readily, most urgently, in times of confusion and despair, when life as we know it has ceased to make sense and we must derive for ourselves not only what makes it livable but what makes it worth living. Those are clarifying times, sanctifying times, when the simulacra of meaning we have consciously and unconsciously borrowed from our culture — God and money, the family unit and perfect teeth — fall away to reveal the naked soul of being, to hone the spirit on the mortal bone. (author bolded)
I won’t tell you things will be fine. They may not be fine at all for a great many of us no matter how you voted and no matter how you feel about current conditions. If “fine” means keeping the status quo, none of us will be fine.
If we redefine what “fine” looks like, they may well be. If by being fine we learn to handle life’s inevitable vicissitudes, then you and I will indeed be just fine.
My friend Melissa, who has worked her good work in Elder Concierge, has yet another friend in hospice breathing her last breaths, as she wrote this morning. No matter what we imagine comes to “snack” on us, there are those facing the end of life altogether.
You and I are still alive. Some well, some not. But we are still alive. And that really is fine, given the options.
Despair only becomes permanent with our active participation and permission. It is a profound statement of personal power to use despair to deepen our appreciation for the life we’ve been given.
What are we going to do with the time we are given? The time given to despair, truly embracing those feelings, strengthens the time we are given to be deeply grateful no matter what conditions we face.
That is where I am. Willing to feel despair for real and/or imagined losses, not willing to overwhelm Dear Reader and those I love with what I carry.
Despair has a job. I have a job with despair. It’s sacred but temporary.
Learn to dance in the rain. Be cold, be wet, be shivering. Then get up and dance anyway. It’s a lot more fun that way.
Let’s play. We’re worth it.
Thanks as always for reading my work. Please consider paying for a subscription as frankly, that’s going to be important soon. Thanks in advance if you do, if not kindly consider
If someone you know needs this message, kindly pass it along. Above all, embrace the fullness of all of your emotions. You’ve got this.
I feel all the feels right along with you, Julia -- I've often said I could give seminars in catastrophic thinking. In a way, I find that propensity a strength right now because I've learned not to give my imaginings too much power. Even the ones that could be called reasonable. Whatever comes we will deal with it -- and I think those of us, yes even us women, who've grown up with white privilege like I have can learn a lot from Black people and gay people and all the people who have never had any illusions about this being a friendly, safe country for them.
Such a beautiful and deeply kind piece. By sharing your despair and your resilience for moving forward, you give all of your readers permission to do the same. "Feel the fear and do it anyway!" Thank you for this today -- it's exactly what so many of us needed to hear. Big hugs.