Sipping the wisdom of misery: The highs of life
There is an old adage that says something about how life never gets less hard, we just handle the hard better. When I think of the hard, I don’t mean that things have sometimes been a struggle- what I mean is that life has truly dealt me several size extra-large, bottomless cups of heartache. Most of them are common in the human condition: loss, suffering, mental illness, grief. Some of us not dealing, numbing instead, or denying, some of us are wailing at the wall. Not all the cups are the same. But we are all tending the bar.
What I feel now, approaching 34, is that while I have plenty of cups of misery collecting around my nightstand, I have learned to sip the wisdom of my suffering. I used to feel like such a victim; life had played me and I was lesser for it. I’ve been called dramatic once or twice in my life. But what I know now, quite opposite, is that yes, life has played me quite a bit, but I am so much better for it. I wake up at night, drenched in my own sweat often. Anxiety riddles me on a near constant basis. Deep, dark depression, looming on the sidelines, waiting to strike when I forget to take my little red pill. But when I wake, I sip on my cup of misery for a moment and try to see through the fog. I ask myself, now, what will this teach me? Where will my flow of anger lead me to today? How can I be something from this? You see, the hardship, the work of life never subsides. We only learn that it is a constant companion. Instead of asking it to leave, we learn to acknowledge and accept it’s presence. We begin to live harmoniously. Or try to, at the very least.
There is not always an answer. There is a lot of waiting. Not knowing whether the house payment will be able to be paid in full this month. Watching my children play outside with bated breath, knowing if someone breaks an arm I don’t have insurance for them. I wonder daily if most of my life’s problems would go away with a bigger paycheck. Who needs faith and trust in a higher power when you have enough money to pay the bills? If making my house payment was guaranteed, would I sleep at night for the first time in a whole year? If my children could go to the doctor, would I feel relief at the dinner table, watching them eat, instead of holding my breath? Perhaps. But here we are, instead. Working on practicing radical acceptance of what is.
I take my pills, I try to sleep. I cope in ways that I can. I drink water. I play outside with the children. I do yoga and I sit in silence, often. I calm my nerves in quirky ways. I swim in the ocean on the hottest days. I daydream about vacations I know I will never take. I kiss my husband and I touch the children’s cheeks at night. I hold them all, tightly, each and every day. These are the drugs that get me through the misery of life. This oxytocin induced high, where love and softness and the grass turning green in the spring get my head spinning just enough to take the edge off. Things like the bottom of the car filled with sand after a day at the beach, or coming home to already sleeping children and getting to bypass bedtime responsibilities, or the feeling of the dog’s ears. A tender moment between friends, holding each others arms or babies or moments for each other. They are quite fleeting, quick enough to pass you by if you don’t notice them. Dragonflies, fluttering and hovering for just a moment before taking off again. But they are enough to last me these days, to get me through this long winter, because after sipping on my misery, I become wise enough to recognize them.
