Book
Ten Ways To Stop Buying Books Like This
It is okay to be down
It is okay to be angry or sad or terrified or anxious or depressed. It is okay to feel guilty or to have regrets. Being “down” is not a sign of failure; it is a natural phase in the cycle of life. If we try to keep from ever getting depressed, we might as well try to keep from ever getting hungry or dirty or cold. The sun rises and the sun sets. People get happy and then they get sad and then they get happy again. That’s the way it works.
So one way to stop buying books like this is to stop fighting depression. We look for books like this because we want a “fix” for getting down. Just accept the fact that you are going to be down for a certain portion of your life and stop trying to overcome it. There are ways to drive through it, but drive through it you must … again and again. You cannot overcome it, entirely.
If this sounds depressing to you, consider the following:
Every person who has ever lived has gotten depressed. Regardless of fame or fortune, regardless of spiritual prowess, regardless of intelligence or breeding or care, every single person who has ever lived has felt the world coming down upon their balding head, from time to time. Jesus did not say “Cursed are the down in heart”. He said “Blessed are the down in heart”, or something like that. And for the record, Jesus was down quite a bit.
This has always been the story of man, since the beginning of his time on earth. It is the basis of all religion. It is the substance of art and war and sport and it is central to the concept of heroism. Think about it. What makes a hero? What is heroic about being perpetually on a roll? Anybody can perform when he is happy and things are going his way.
No living organism on earth is perpetually on the upswing. The science of Complexity Theory teaches us that living organisms (and even some non-living ones, like the weather system or the economy) ALL go through cycles of expansion and contraction, increase and decrease, ups and downs.
So just accept it and realize that there must be a reason for it and stop beating your head against a wall, trying to beat it. You did not choose many, many things about your existence on this planet (as far as we know): you did not choose the city in which you were born, you did not choose your sex, you did not choose your blood type, you did not choose war among the peoples of the earth … and you did not choose to be depressed from time to time.
Besides, there are some deeply troubling things about life. There are profound, unanswered questions that can haunt you down and bore a hole into your skull, if you think about them long enough. It is perfectly natural to be haunted by these things. It might not be much fun, but it happens to us all.
Now, if this is beginning to sink in, it will not take long for you to make an important realization: accepting the fact that you are going to be depressed can actually make you less depressed. This is an advanced concept that we will cover in more detail later, but for now let us just say that it has a negligible affect.
Yes, accepting the fact that you are going to be depressed and that it is not your fault and that it is part of the natural order of the universe will, to some extent, blunt the depth of your depression - but not enough to matter right now. You will still get depressed, even if you accept it. And at times, it will be every bit as crushing as it ever was. Sorry.
It is okay to be bored
It is okay to be frustrated and confused and bored. It is okay to feel stymied, unable to move up or down. This is the middle ground. This is the natural transition phase between periods of deep despair and periods of deep joy. As we cycle from one extreme to the next, we naturally go through periods when we feel almost nothing at all.
The important thing to remember when we are bored is to stay the course. Too often, we go off on tangents when we feel stuck like this. We make sweeping changes in our lives, just to stir things up. Being frustrated and bored is extremely difficult for people like us. We would rather feel the sting of battle than to feel nothing at all.
But take heart; you will definitely feel the sting of battle again, through no effort of your own. You are still part of the cycle, and it will take you on another ride. Let it come to you.
Rest while you can.
It is okay to be on a roll
It is okay to be ecstatic and manic and flush with the endless possibilities of your eternal life. Being jacked-up and inspired is a beautiful thing. Feeling the sting of energy, as it bursts from your pores, is sublime.
People like us are sometimes made to feel ridiculous, when we get like this. People who live more moderate lives sometimes lose patience with us, when we are spinning around in circles, directing and dissecting and dissolving and dedicating. But the world takes all kinds of people. People like that need people like us.
And people like us need people like them. We are the fighter jets - but they are the aircraft carriers. Without them, we have nowhere to land. Without us, they have no one to fly the dangerous missions into enemy territory, where there is screaming and gnashing of teeth.
So fly. Let go. When you feel that you might just single-handedly conquer the world … go ahead and conquer it.
The world needs conquering.
It is just a cycle
Everybody on earth goes through cycles that take them up and down. You and I just experience these cycles on a much broader scale. When we go down, we go way down. When we go up, we go way up. Not everybody experiences these cycles with such tremendous force. Some people experience the cycles in a relatively narrow range: they may feel a little down from time to time, but for the most part they feel pretty good. You and I sometimes see things that would curdle motor oil - and sometimes we see angels.
It is just a cycle. We go up and then we go down and then we go up again. It is just that for some people, the cycle is like a roller coaster. For us, it is like sky-diving into the ocean with no parachute, then riding back up on a submarine missile.
And it is good work, if you can get it.
The purpose of this book
The purpose of this book is two-fold:
First, I want to make the case that all of this is perfectly natural, and I believe that you will be convinced of this point by the end of the book. Second, I want to offer some tactics for dealing with this natural reality, which may (or may not) be useful to you.
However, I am not trying to sell you anything. Books that promise ten ways to fix your life are pandering to the immemorial human drive to escape the deep difficulty of life. Some of these books are helpful, but the sheer volume of them seems to indicate that if you only had the time to read them all, you could fix everything.
And these books invariably seem to indicate that you should fix everything, that you have disfiguring psychological defects that make you less of a person (certainly less of a person than the person who wrote the book). It is my position that you are not less of a person (certainly no less of a person than the person who wrote this book).
I believe that you can learn to accept the deep difficulty of life and I believe that you can rise above it. You can learn to ride the highs and endure the lows, but you cannot escape the cycle that brings both into your life, anymore than you can stop the leaves from turning yellow and red, then turning brown, then falling to the ground where they rot and return to the earth.
I am not trying to sell you a solution. I am not even trying to sell you this book. Remember the cover?
I told you not to buy it.
Your shorts have not stopped working
Most of us try to stay on top. When we have been up for a while, we resolve to stay there forever. It seems easy enough. Our minds are working beautifully. We are capable of almost anything, and we can shrug-off setbacks with ease. It all seems so pure and natural and good.
When we are down, we struggle mightily to get back up. We believe that we failed, that we simply lost our way. We search desperately for the magic dust that will make us whole again, and we resolve to never let ourselves get into this position again.
When I catch myself thinking in this way, I imagine the primitive man.
The primitive man wears shorts in the summer. For months, the shorts suit him well. But then fall arrives and he feels a chill in the air. He begins to think that his shorts have stopped working. All during the fall, he stubbornly continues to wear his shorts, even though he gets progressively colder and more uncomfortable. He washes them and sprinkles magic dust on them, in an effort to restore the qualities that made him feel good.
Finally, as winter approaches, he just gives up and goes back to his firs. He throws his shorts in the corner of his cave, disgusted that he cannot make them work like they used to work. But then a funny thing happens: his firs start working again.
So all during the winter, he wears his fir coats and they make him very comfortable, indeed. He determines to wear the firs forever. He decides that the shorts were a ridiculous obsession and that the firs are really the right choice, after all.
Then spring arrives and his firs start to make him hot. He becomes furious, because now even his firs have stopped working. Stubbornly, he wears them all throughout the spring, sweating like a wild boar the whole time. Finally, he strips off the firs and looks around the cave for something else to wear. He catches a glimpse of the shorts out of the corner of his eye and wonders if they somehow started working again, all by themselves. He puts them on and finds to his considerable consternation that they feel great.
He sets his firs on fire.
Staying warm
The primitive man seems silly to us, because we know better. But it makes perfect sense to him. It appears for all the world that his shorts make it hot outside, while his firs make it cold. After all, he is just wandering around his cave trying to make sense of everything on his own. He has no user’s manual. He cannot search the Internet.
In much the same way, we tend to believe that our thought processes during any given point in the cycle actually cause the cycle. It is natural to think this from a certain point of view. But the truth is that certain thoughts occur when we are up and certain other thoughts occur when we are down and neither causes the cycle to occur.
This is precisely why you cannot “think” your way out of depression. And it is why you cannot talk good sense into a person who is manic and drunk on the possibilities of Life.
Trying to act like we are up, when we are actually down, just makes us look silly. Stubbornly refusing to believe that conditions have changed just makes us frustrated until finally, out of desperation, we adjust to the change.
Wearing heavy clothing in the winter will not make the winter go away. It will make us more comfortable during the winter, but it will not affect the temperature by a single degree. Likewise, learning how to deal with depression will not make the depression go away. It will make us more comfortable during depression, but it will not lessen the depression, itself, in any way.
Accepting the cycles of change
So far, we have said that it is okay to be depressed, it is okay to be bored, and it is okay to be ecstatic. We have said that these three emotional states are all part of a natural cycle that repeats itself and that the cycle is largely beyond our control. We have said that the primary difference between people like us and people who live more moderate lives is the depth of our experience, at any given point in the cycle. And we have said that this book is not required reading for anybody, at any time.
Now let’s go back to something. The phrase “beyond our control” does not sit well with our modern view of life, does it? As modern, progressive, well-read people of the developed world, we have been taught to believe that virtually nothing is beyond our control. Yet, clearly, many things are - like the changing of the seasons. The seasons do change and there is precious little that we can do about it.
However, there are all sorts of things that we can do to help mitigate any adverse affects of this change and enjoy the aspects of it that are pleasurable. We can go swimming in the summer. We can leave the doors open during the spring and fall. We can build a roaring fire in winter and we can carry an umbrella year-around. In fact, over the millennia of mankind’s tenure on earth, we have actually learned to enjoy this change, despite the fact that it is completely beyond our control. But we have done so by learning to adapt and to appreciate the change - not by trying to prevent it.
We live on a planet that undergoes predictable cycles of almost every conceivable kind: the sun rises and the sun sets; the weather gets cold and the weather gets hot; economies expand and economies contract; living organisms are born and grow strong and then they grow weak and die.
You and I are part of the earth in this way. We go through cycles of our own and there is not a thing in the world that we can do about it. Fighting it is ridiculous and absurd.
It is not something to be fixed. It is something to be understood.
The rest is coming soon …
Want to help me publish this book? My plan right now is to self-publish the book as I get time … but I am open to other ideas.
Everything on this site (except for comments) is original material and is Copyrighted 2009 by:
Jeffrey D. Talley (J.D.Tal)
P.O. Box 59351
Homewood, AL 35259
jdtal@tenwaze.com
By CW, June 20, 2009 @ 10:10 pm
I like this.
Almost absurdly simple and yet… not.