A Stroll Through The Park on a Sunny Day

During my depression, my world narrowed.  I just didn’t want to go anywhere.  My life was lived inside coffee shops, on the couch watching television, sitting in my office with the door closed.  There was something deadening about this.  In hindsight, I guess I felt that doing something else wouldn’t make a difference anyway.

I have learned over the years that nature is a powerful antidote to depression.  Being in nature does make a difference.  Maybe it’s because there is such power in nature.  It’s always in motion, isn’t it?  There isn’t any clinical depression in nature.  Humans evolved from the natural world, not from concrete and office towers.  One study found that a walk in a park or countryside reduced depression whereas walking in a shopping center or urban setting increased depression.  This summer, I am going to reconnect with nature by taking my daughter on nature walks.  During these times, I just want to let my incessant conversation with my depression go and let nature speak to me.

Pushing Back Against Depression

Depression will push our backs up against the wall. It often seems bigger than us: a bully. If we let it, it will pound us down. So, we’ve got to push back.

If we don’t fight back, together with the help of others, depression can consume our lives leaving only our pulse and some air in our lungs, but precious little else. The vitality, the passion and full array of emotions that make life worth living may be sucked up out of us as if by an alien ship from above.

There are many tools to fight depression. They can certainly help us regain our footing and make our lives functional and productive again. But isn’t life more than just about a return to “normal”? We all have dreams and aspire to live them. Theres’s something wild about dreams.  So often, they are outside our “normal”. And regaining them is a big part of recovery for it is these passions that bring us most fully alive in the cosmos. And we have to fight for our dreams.

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Just like fighting a bully, pushing back against depression takes courage. We have to reach deep down inside ourselves to listen to that part of our life force in us all that gives us the grit to say to depression,“no more”. We must say to ourselves, “I’m sick and tired of being ‘sick and tired’”.

When we’re ready to make some changes, we push the bully back. A small push in the beginning will do. We gain some space and separation from this goblin. We stop defining ourselves as a “depressed person,” as if our identity were wholly made up of our affliction. We are not our depression. It is a part, albeit a very painful part, of our lives. But it need not be all of it.

To fight back against depression, we need to empower ourselves to level the playing field. One of the best ways is learn mindfulness. With it, we gain detachment from our negative thoughts and emotions. Mindfulness teaches us that pessimistic thoughts and disturbing emotions are clouds passing in the sky, not reality.  Check out the excellent book, The Mindful Way Through Depression to learn more.

If we don’t buy into the depressed stories our minds spin out, we can begin to see them for what they are: puffs of cerebral and neurochemical smoke. We don’t have to buy into them.  We don’t have to live by that script.

This takes a lot of practice and we have to start slowing. This is, by no means, a quick “fix”. But in detaching ourselves from our mental jumble and the over reactive emotions that accompany my anxiety and depression, we gain freedom. We again have choices in life. We need not walk in the deep ruts of depression anymore.

And this is empowering.

Poet, Mary Oliver in her poem, “The Journey,”beautifully captures the sense of determination we need to recover from depression:

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice–
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do–
determined to save
the only life you could save.

 

 

 

Warping Through Our Days

As a child, I would sit in the back seat of my parent’s old car with my dog, Sherman.  As the car wound through the countryside where we lived, Sherman and I would stick our heads out the window during the summer as the wind whipped through our hair.  There was such simple joy in this experience of speed, of motion.  Of being carried through carefree space.

When we think of the speed of our lives as lawyers we cringe, don’t we?  Our lives aren’t just lived in the fast lane, they’re lived at warp speed.  At the periphery of our vision, we see only problems and other stressors.  Any hope of joy gets sucked right out of our days like the grains of sand slipping through the narrow gap in a hour glass.

We hear so much talk of “time management”; of the next simple ten things we all need to get our lives together; to be a successful end product.  Such talk has its place, but it seems that we never catch up with ourselves.  We are warping onto the next thing on our “TO DO LIST”.

In his book, Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity, poet and corporate trainer, David Whyte, uses the metaphor of a sea voyage to depict the journey through the world of work.  He views work not only as a means of support, but as a means for interacting with the world and developing self-expression and identity. This is not a self-help book of step-by-step pragmatism, but rather how to forge one’s relationship with time and daily ritual.  In one passage, he speaks about his friendship with Benedictine monk, Brother David Steindlrast.  David is speaking to him about his stressed out life.  Brother David tells him that the antidote to his exhaustion is not rest, but “wholeheartedness.” See this interesting clip on David giving a talk.

Put aside the appointment book for today. Turn off the ignition switch of your life for a bit.  In his book, David notes that the poet Keats believed that truly great people have the ability to accept that not everything can be resolved, that they can thrive on uncertainty.  As lawyers, it is so easy for us to emotionally shut down when faced with the grind of uncertainty.  Maybe we have lived lives like this for years; we have closed our hearts to our own hearts.  Yet, there may come a turning point in our lives when we are ready.  When we are ready to listen to what the poet Keats called “the holiness of the hearts affections.”  Part of David’s poem, The Opening of Eyes, reads:

“It is the opening of eyes long closed. It is the vision of far off things seen for the silence they hold. It is the heart after years of secret conversing speaking out loud in the clean air”.

 Listen to that heart within you today.  Let it speak out loud into the air of your day.

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