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November Newsletter: Gratitude
🕑 Added 2024-11-01 17:21:53 +0000 UTCI have a recurring nightmare of clams. I’m on the beach, walking into the ocean, when suddenly I find my feet pinched by thousands of hard, painful objects - a seabed full of shelled mollusks, sinking their hinged jaws into my flesh. These creatures have always revolted me, those unmistakable signs of life from what seems more like an object than a creature awakening a primal dread within me. Their existence seems to imply the existence of life without beauty, without gentleness, without the slightest glimpse of anything a human would value in life.
The other day during meditation, I suddenly realized with a shock - I am that seabed. That mass of pinched-off, blind sea creatures I encountered in my dreams was not a reflection of external life, but of my own nature. I am a complex of closed-off, ossified nuggets of life. When I receive something good, I close it off, turning it into something to be hoarded and protected. When I receive something bad, I close it off, calcifying it into a grudge, a black mark of resentment. When life enters, as it does day by day, it encounters a bed of these pinching mollusks, who divide the spoil among them.
The “dark night of the soul” is a phrase that comes from St. John of the Cross. His teachings tell us that every soul must pass through a dark night, stripped of comfort and solace, encountering horror and hopelessness, before it can be united with God. The source of the horror is the dawning realization of our own weakness, our impotence and fallibility.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I have never liked the sound of such a spiritual philosophy. I steer my life away from pain and fear - why submit to a map of reality that promises these things in abundance? Yet this is, undeniably, reality: pain and fear exist, and we encounter them, pass through them. Everyone travels through darkness. In a thousand little ways, I have shut myself off, refused to accept darkness: the limits of my own knowledge and of others, the world which lies beyond human limits of understanding. I have always wanted to know the answer right away, to skip to the happy ending, for everything to be good, fun, untroubling and wholesome. In these thousand little turning-aways from the difficult middle, I’ve infested my seabed with biting, half-dead mollusks.
My process now is in training these mollusks to open up, one by one. For the past month I have been letting go of more and more. I travelled to Portland for the weekend, and ate much less than normal, the result of the typical ebb-and-flow of travel on a limited diet. In the past this would have affected my mind and mood terribly, as I clung onto a belief that any disruption of my routine was an insurmountable challenge. Instead, I remained open, and had a great time. I’ve also been cutting down on screen time, limiting myself to doing work on the computer, not idling on my laptop or phone to try and get pleasure. After a week or so of persistent thoughts that what I was doing was worthless, I noticed that my interactions with other people were getting much more vivid and pleasurable, and charged with almost none of the intense social anxiety I was used to. In breaking open habits that I formed to help cope with fear, I had started to break down the fear as well.
I also started a daily gratitude practice, naming things I am grateful for. This is another practice that my brain has always told me is worthless. I’m discovering that one of my oldest, hardest-baked clams is the “Poor Me” clam, an inner narrative that I have been given an unjust burden of unendurable pain, and that no mortal kindness can alleviate it or make up for it. As long as I was unable to accept darkness as a part of life, I was likewise unable to accept the bright spots as the blessings that they are.
Now, I’m chipping away at that clam with conscious practice. For the month of November, I’ll share essays throughout the month on things I’m grateful for, as they surface day to day. The more I open up, the more I discover that life is not devoid of beauty, gentleness, and value, no matter how dark it looks from the outside.
Comments
Slumox Gd
Beautiful words. I will try to remember and use this
Souly
I’ve had zombie dreams since I was a little kid, always breaking into my home, turning it into chaos I cant control, It’s that fear of having my ‘safe place’ invaded stuck with me. Recently, my room’s been in chaos, intense burnout taking over. But today, I decided to clear everything out, bought new furniture, and started fresh. It’s not done yet, and my room isn’t the most comfortable right now but here’s to hoping I can turn my space into somewhere I actually feel “safe” again.
Raydyn
These words came to me at the exact moment I needed them, I feel. Thank you so much for sharing these thoughts
Car Seat
Oh yeah, I think active, real-world reparation is a big part of it. Inner work and outer work go hand in hand.
Mădălina
Without spoiling the book, I'd say that similar imagery is at the core of Cărtărescu's novel Solenoid. It's a challenging read, but quite rewarding and I feel that some of the ideas expressed here are mirrored in the novel
Ai Miller
I think a lot about pain, mostly because I feel like I can take so little of it before also shutting down. There was a moment in realizing that even as the new world I felt drawn to make through political action would be better, there wouldn't be an elimination of pain, that pain and suffering will continue to exist even as we abolish systems of harm and build new containers for repair and healing, and it was sort of devastating. And I think I am still resistant in my own journey around exploring life to giving into the fact of pain's resistance to repair, that there are pains that cannot be helped--I find myself less drawn to Woe is Me and more to What If We Fixed It, and the reality of pain that I cannot fix, in my own life or those I love or the world more generally, becomes sort of the moral center of my life. Where is pain a part of our existence and where is it a failure that we need to address? And I think for me, what I've discovered is that the healing is partially in the doing; in working with people to address pain in a serious and careful way. And that the work becomes the place to notice the good, to be grateful. Which veers off quite wildly from what you've written here, but this certainly made me think about my own relationship with my clams!
Marshall
This is so beautiful
Twitchy
I remember I once cut my foot quite badly on a clam while on a beach. It was quite odd because it was probably one of the deepest cuts I've ever had but didn't bleed much at all. I suppose the soles of one's feet are thick enough to prevent any real damage from taking place due to a cut like that. But it did still hurt a lot, with all the frayed nerve endings and the salt and sand seeping in to the open wound, agitating and agitating it until I could find a second to sit down. I was terrified I'd have to get stitches again.
Courtney Bowen
i often catch myself in my journaling indulging in the “woe is me” mentality and have to make the conscious effort to acknowledge aspects of my life where i am fortunate. thank you for sharing this relatable newsletter, will. i look forward to reading your gratitude essays <3
frankie
this is such a beautiful post :) i think practicing gratitude for someone who’s been so used to unhealthily clinging to bad emotions can feel silly at the beginning (talking about myself here) but it’s genuinely so helpful. journaling and meditation has helped me a lot. i’m grateful for soo much in this life that i don’t think ill ever run out of things to write about even if sometimes it doesn’t feel that way. as an avid subscriber of absurdism, the idea of experiencing life sandwiched between two infinities of nothingness is a philosophy that strangely helps me be more in tune with gratitude. my time on earth is a miracle and consciousness is special in its own unexplainable way. and also i’m just grateful for the small things like my sense of smell and that i have hands. i’m grateful for your music as well, definitely helped me learn that vulnerability isn’t shameful. bless up.
Kamil Tomaszewski
But in all seriousness. This is very well written and i can resonate with its message
Fionn
I love this message, and its so well written:)
Kamil Tomaszewski
Last night i dreamed clams were trying to kill you, i woke up and clams were trying to kill you
Drew
this was so beautifully written, i may have to start doing the same
