Saw the hole and decided to turn around and find another direction.

You know it’s very easy to dive into a deep hole, and surround yourself in darkness, if you want to. Sometimes the darkness can be comforting like a blanket because at least it means you feel something, in a world where you can all too quickly feel nothing at all, because everything can loose its sense of meaning. But it’s not a place you want to be for long, because after a while it begins to be normal, and you forget that what we are actually meant to be is happy.

So I looked into my own abyss and I saw darkness, warm and laced with pain like blunt razor blades being dragged over your arm. All I had to do was fall into it… Just let go.

At that moment, I realised there was nothing to be gained by going back there again. Everything is different this time around. My whole world is different, and my life is good. To surrender to the pain of depression would simply be doing so out habit; an old habit that I had discarded like a pair of jeans worn and tattered beyond use. There would be nothing to be gained, and hence no reason to go there. Not now, and I have come to realise, not ever again. The realisation came like the morning after a night of rain; the dark times are well and truly over, and the light of a new day now shines.

Poetic words to be sure, but the flowery nature of their meaning conveys well what has been going on in my head over the last ten days. I decided that instead of giving in to these feelings of being lost and helpless, I could instead change these things that were in turn causing me to feel confused and powerless. As funny as it will sound, I took a day off work to make a long weekend and completely cleaned up my flat. I did three years worth of – badly – overdue filing work on an four foot pile of unsorted letters and official correspondance. As the great Buddhist master Milarepa said, if you don’t have order in the home, then you won’t have order in the mind. True enough, this cleansing of my own space became a deeply relaxing activity, almost meditative really, for as I tamed the physical space of my surroundings, I also purged those negative feelings which had so heavily clung to my mind. Each small peice of paper put into place in a folder mirrored itself in my mind with a bad thought or feeling put right. The sense of satisfaction at the end resonated deeply within me, as I become suffused with a new sense of calm that I haven’t known in the last period of my grown up life.

At the end of this time, I look back now and realise that if we can look at our lives with honest and appreciative eyes we will find things of happiness, and we will find a road ahead of us that will be meaningful and worth taking.

Padwanna!

The Saw the hole and decided to turn around and find another direction. by Mentalechoes, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.