Something I've thought for a while now is that life's good things (food, intimacy, warmth) aren't enough to counteract the bad (disease, loneliness, death). I've probably already posted on this, but I'm not really that flash a conductor of new and fine ideas, so this is a rehash.
It came up again today during my counseling shift. Usually, I find that most callers don't get to me - lonely people and people upset with their family/partner/friends (majority of calls) don't really touch me that deeply, perhaps because I see their problems as solvable, perhaps not easily, but still able to be changed. What gets me right in the gut are the people with problems which have no easy solution, or even any potential for change at all. Today, a teenage girl rang - all happy chatter about her move overseas, naive, sweet, so normal that I wondered what she rang for. And then a little at a time, the cracks started to show and the hurts and wounds of her soul rose up to the surface, still covered with a darling innocence, a baffled kind of wonder at what she herself was capable of doing to herself and at the pain other people were capable of causing. She got to me, she really did, I felt for this child-adult and when the call wound up, I had to take a break, let it loosen and slide away and settle.
Later, someone with schizophrenia called, in the midst of an episode. She got to me as well - talking of what she was seeing, her mind slipping and diving and shrieking, at time normal, at times terrifying, with me sucked inside this great strangeness of hers. I cannot even imagine the horror of a mind like that, of being unable to verify reality, of the haunted huntedness at all times, even when you close your eyes. How do people live with this? How can you accommodate such great hurt and alienness, such pain and suffering and not burst? How do people keep going? I feel the gap between the good things and bad every time I have to sell the idea of life to someone who no longer buys it, who has weathered such pain that my humble offerings - their children, friends, walks, books, food - are pitiful things, shrunken, meager, insufficient and the alternative is bright in contrast. And this is Australia, this is wealth and comfort, this is not war and starvation and disease. It helps me understand the need for religion, a belief based on desperation. It's no surprise that religion is flourishing in those desperate places, the peripheries, the poor, because they need it still whereas we pretend we do not, until the life in which we are In Control is taken away and replaced with a life in which walking up stairs takes an hour, where gathering in unruly thoughts or quashing the dark suspicions and lurking thoughts is a full-time job.
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It's occured to me that this blog presents a skewed view of me as morose, introspective etc. That's funny, because I'm not. But what is there to write about happy things? There's a reason that movies end once the climactic happy event occurs - because happiness is boring (at least to write about)
It came up again today during my counseling shift. Usually, I find that most callers don't get to me - lonely people and people upset with their family/partner/friends (majority of calls) don't really touch me that deeply, perhaps because I see their problems as solvable, perhaps not easily, but still able to be changed. What gets me right in the gut are the people with problems which have no easy solution, or even any potential for change at all. Today, a teenage girl rang - all happy chatter about her move overseas, naive, sweet, so normal that I wondered what she rang for. And then a little at a time, the cracks started to show and the hurts and wounds of her soul rose up to the surface, still covered with a darling innocence, a baffled kind of wonder at what she herself was capable of doing to herself and at the pain other people were capable of causing. She got to me, she really did, I felt for this child-adult and when the call wound up, I had to take a break, let it loosen and slide away and settle.
Later, someone with schizophrenia called, in the midst of an episode. She got to me as well - talking of what she was seeing, her mind slipping and diving and shrieking, at time normal, at times terrifying, with me sucked inside this great strangeness of hers. I cannot even imagine the horror of a mind like that, of being unable to verify reality, of the haunted huntedness at all times, even when you close your eyes. How do people live with this? How can you accommodate such great hurt and alienness, such pain and suffering and not burst? How do people keep going? I feel the gap between the good things and bad every time I have to sell the idea of life to someone who no longer buys it, who has weathered such pain that my humble offerings - their children, friends, walks, books, food - are pitiful things, shrunken, meager, insufficient and the alternative is bright in contrast. And this is Australia, this is wealth and comfort, this is not war and starvation and disease. It helps me understand the need for religion, a belief based on desperation. It's no surprise that religion is flourishing in those desperate places, the peripheries, the poor, because they need it still whereas we pretend we do not, until the life in which we are In Control is taken away and replaced with a life in which walking up stairs takes an hour, where gathering in unruly thoughts or quashing the dark suspicions and lurking thoughts is a full-time job.
------
It's occured to me that this blog presents a skewed view of me as morose, introspective etc. That's funny, because I'm not. But what is there to write about happy things? There's a reason that movies end once the climactic happy event occurs - because happiness is boring (at least to write about)
posted by Doug @ 9/02/2004 11:33:00 am
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