“… the spirit has its homeland, which is the realm of the meaning of things.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The Wisdom of the Sands
(Later famously quoted in the 1987
Clive Barker novel, Weaveworld)
Simultaneous to the pandemic continuing to rage in this first month of 2021, I ease towards the half-century mark and find composing an inaugural entry of my long-awaited blog extremely surreal. While 2020 has emotionally taken its toll on everyone, I don’t think many would accuse me of being nihilistic, or the very least, pessimistic, to say more horror is very possibly around the corner. Without dimishing the severity of COVID and the reality of the death toll, one must consider the long-term impact of this radical a change in our culture. While none of us need a blog to detail the hiking statistics on depression, suicide, divorce, and overall malaise, not to mention economic impact, the focus for the individual and the collective must bend toward solution. For this, one must turn to history.
After all, the tribal and polarized reactions to the virus, the politics surrounding it, and politics in general boiling in the background, amplified by social media, have yielded us little else than violence and turmoil. What have we really gained in this largely unconscious, monkey-brain behavior? Not much.
As we wait for the end of the scourge, we live in fear of what each new day will bring. While the seeming randomness of Corona is not unlike any of the crapshoot deathtraps that await us each day, it has the added bonus of hitting us where it hurts the most: socially. Keep your distance, no touch, wear a mask, don’t go out unless you have to, quarantine when necessary, avoid practically everyone.
For a species evolved as social creatures, this won’t do.The displeasure and social pain so many have felt is not something new to homo sapiens, however. This has always been at play in a percentage of our population; the past year has simply seen it highlighted, enlarged. We all are desensitized to these issues normally, as they tend to be talked about in terms of the individual, not the collective. Yet the traumatic issues bubble to the surface when happening en masse. Whether it’s a war, a coup, a genocide or a pandemic, the collective psychology remains the same, and calls for the same remedy: a reassessment and reenergizing of meaning.
2011. Like many, I was struggling to deal with losing a lot of money in real estate following the ’08 Crash. I was in a new marriage going sour, had lost my dad several years before, and was feeling generally like I was not following my bliss. Driving to the dance studio where I worked one day, my heart started racing, I started sweating, and I was scared beyond belief. I thought I was having a heart attack. The only thought was getting to a hospital, but I felt there was no way I could drive further, no way I would make it. I pulled over and after about twenty minutes, the crushing feeling subsided and things went back to semi-normal. By “semi-normal” I mean that psychologically I was from then on terrified that the experience would return. It did, many times.
Of course, what I had experienced wasn’t a heart attack, rather a panic attack, which are commonly mistaken for heart attacks, until victims learn otherwise. The attacks being as overwhelming and frightening as they were, I found myself wishing it was a heart attack instead of my mind and body turning against itself. In a desperate scramble, I learned everything I could about anxiety and panic attacks in the months that followed.
I worked out, did my martial arts, dancing three times as much, hoping that the extreme exertion of the body would allay the desperate fear my mind perceived, thinking the next dreaded attack may be on the next horizon. I was extra careful when driving, as attacks commonly would creep up when behind the wheel, the slight boost in stress of being on the road being a trigger. I sought numerous types of therapy, went to bed with soothing music, and became heavily invested in EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing). This latter has numerous methods of bilateral stimulation, the theory of which is the increased communication of both brain hemispheres, which allows for deeper, more substantial processing and the healing of mental trauma. It sounded good and whether a larger percentage of the healing I experienced was from this technique or from the placebo of believing it, I could care less. I needed something that worked.
This three-year ordeal culminated in the morning I was standing in my kitchen, thinking of how I was going to force myself to eat, as I had lost fifty pounds. Looking around my house, my vision became distorted and fragmented. Reality felt like it was slipping from my body, to be replaced by illusion and abstraction. I truly felt this was what it must mean to be insane.
All my life, when the subject had come up in conversation, I would say of suicide, “no one knows what’s going through anyone else’s mind, but I don’t feel I would ever do that.” In that moment and for some time after, I totally understood why someone would throw themselves from a bridge, hang themselves, or do any other number of horrible to stop time and experience. When the mind is against itself, it’s nearly impossible for the mind to heal the mind.
Oddly enough, I found going to work not only doable, but necessary. Being able to focus on others, not myself, teaching dance and martial arts, forced me to not be in my own head. This was the last place I wanted to be, as psychic storms were raging.
Meaning had left the building. Those many things that had been woven into my upbringing and adopted into my worldview were suddenly non-existent. The value system we all learn to assign to ideas and things in life was scrambled, incoherent, lost. It was not that these things had been truly evaporated from my being, however. It was that the body was in extremis from so many stressors, so many factors that felt desperately out of my control.
I talked with many people during this time who had suffered from panic attacks, some for decades. They all had similar threads to their stories, as did the books that were worth reading on anxiety and depression. I came to realize these were two sides of the same coin, the former manifesting as attacks, the mind racing, adrenal glands overworking, stultifying fear, and the latter showing up as long stretches in bed, unable to move, paralyzed, covered by the darkest blanket imaginable. I knew I had to do something, or I wouldn’t be long for this world.
I had been involved with The Mankind Project, a worldwide organization for men that was all about making your life as a man as authentic and terrific as possible. It was through this group that I had met my friend and mentor, Nick Gargala, a therapist, among other things, in Louisville, Kentucky. During one of our helpful conversation, Nick said: “it’s like there’s a big switchboard, with big red buttons. All the buttons are labeled. Job. Relationship. Money. Self-Esteem. Kids. Education. On and on.” A great image, when you think about it.
“For some, it might be job, for others it might be money. You have to find out which of those buttons are lighting up and turn them off,” Nick said. I thought about this as much as my destabilized mind could handle and realized turning the buttons off was my only choice. It’s important to realize these buttons are not aspects of your life you deny or suppress, rather you understand when they’re lit up, it means they’re hot spots and are not working as they should.
My then-wife had expressed not being happy and when I asked if she wanted out of the marriage, she said she did. As much as I didn’t want to go through a divorce, my mind and body was telling me this was one of the switchboard buttons that needed to be turned off. I sold the real estate I had accumulated in the months following, and let go of a few other commitments that were creating stress.
As these things disappeared from my life and I began doing the things my body was enjoying, I found the attacks and depression slowly began to subside. So much so, that I haven’t experienced any of these demons since around 2014. Keeping a realistic balance remains key, and going easier on myself is a lot easier these days, as the most important aspect is kept in sharp focus: meaning.
Perhaps the best-known and most often referenced book on this subject is Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl. In it, Frankl details the unbelievable circumstances of his youth during the apex of the Third Reich, his numerous family members who didn’t make it out of the camps, and his own realization that meaning in life must be developed at all costs. The more meaning, the more one has the ability to weather adversity and the unseen challenges waiting around every corner.
One of the most fascinating things about humans is how meaning somehow materializes in deeper and more poignant ways as stress and adversity increases. This is especially true, historically, if the stress is imposed on the individual and/or group; the fact that they have no choice in the matter seems to heighten the need and ensure the appearance of meaning. There seems to be a paradox here as well. In times of less oppression, coupled with affluence and egalitarian life, there is often a lack or loss of meaning. Meaning being, at least in part, the fuel driving us to work jobs, socialize, eat well, exercise, create, and maintain quality relationships.
What if these things are put on the back burning, though, in something like, say, a pandemic? Does meaning recede into the wings? It’s hard to say without hard data, but it certainly seems to be true as we wrangle with the COVID-wrought issues mentioned earlier. Can the answer be to find a way to infuse more meaning into one’s life?
Perhaps.
This lack-of-meaning problem seems to be something that long predates our current situation, however. After all, the immense popularity of Jordan Peterson in the last five years, especially on social media, bespeaks of the masses’ extreme need for meaning, through responsibility. Peterson’s main admonishment, to be more responsible in your life to create a better life for yourself and others is simply the individual’s end result for meaning in life. If one finds deeper and deeper meaning, it follows that the taking on of responsibility to create a better world must follow, yes?
But, if this is the answer or an answer, how does one go about creating meaning, if for decades perhaps, they’ve felt devoid of it? Deep searching and reflection are required. One thing can be said for certain, that life is much better with meaning in it. All of us can think back on times in life, especially those younger years, where through sheer joy or naieveté one had incredibly new and rich meaning; the days were longer, the sun brighter, and so many things we’ve let go in later years felt important.
One could simply say that at the time we didn’t know any better. We didn’t know enough to realize the things we thought were so important, happened to not be important at all. But is that true? As one creeps past mid-life and has had about every conversation, gone through many experiences now forgotten, and had the fun socialized and educated out of you, it’s hard to know anything that’s important, except what you’re told is important.
A thought: since it’s all made-up, what’s important?
But, it’s not made-up, you say, and I say to you, of course it’s made up. No one wants to believe that, of course, as we’ve all built our lives around narratives written with cosmic fire since the beginning of time. The impossible proving or disproving of these things remains a barren wasteland anyway, from which many books for seekers are written, and fortunes made.
Once we’ve shuffled off this fool’s argument, we can get on with the deeper thing driving all of us: meaning in life. This is the finest fuel of our lives. When we do what makes us feel most deeply, when we know we are on the path deigned for us specifically, yes, this is when we are living.
While my life has been full of rich and diverse experiences, it’s the arts where a character like me is most at home and happiest. I’ve had the good fortune to be heavily involved in martial arts, theatre, film, writing, and partner dancing. This last has been my mainstay career for the past twenty years and is still trickling, as is the entire dance industry.
I had done the occasional voiceover during the last thirty years, for friends’ projects and local production houses. I had not trained specifically in all that time, except through academic efforts, included a Masters in Theatre from the University of Kentucky, and a year and a half spent at Florida State University in their Film and Television MFA Program. As the virus crept in last March, it occurred to me that now would be the perfect time to build a booth in my house and start doing voice work.
Ten months later, the booth’s built to professional specs, and I’ve been practicing and thoroughly enjoying it. To my delight, it seems all my artistic efforts heretofore have somehow provided and supported this new chapter. The possibilities are endless, as is the need for quality voice work.
As we march forward into the great COVID unknown, I once again find myself thankful for what I have, not seething about things I don’t have (and ultimately probably don’t need anyway). I’m grateful to have these things, some old, some new, that are exciting to me, hence meaningful. This critical element, finding or creating meaning for oneself, has certainly eluded me at times in the past, and I was much the worse for it. But it is to this rock that we must cling as we all are hurled headlong into uncertainty, smiling as we go; “joyous participation,” the Buddha said, “in the sorrows of the world.”