Swimming Through the Dark

It’s a regular pattern. Halfway into the night, I am rudely expelled from sleep, like a passenger kicked off a Greyhound bus at terminal nowhere. It’s an oh-shit kind of feeling, a heavy boot to the ass, and down I go, landing in the dark someplace.

It happened last night. This time, at least, the soundtrack was appropriate, an old Pink Floyd song playing in my head:

Hey you, out there in the cold,

getting lonely, getting old.

Can you feel me?

I’ve had worse tunes snagged in my brain, believe me. One night it was I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus. Of course an endless loop of even a suitable song becomes its own evidence of insanity. It doesn’t take long for the sounds in your mind to erode your belief that you are still sound of mind.

I’ve been here before, though. The advice I’ve usually gotten is to get up and go to another part of the house, and my husband certainly appreciates it when I do. But sometimes it’s awfully hard to extricate myself from the comfort of bed with no real plan in mind other than a walk to the living room. So I opted last night to just lie there, as still as possible, probably not still enough.

I try to be considerate. I actually have a special book light that is a little less obnoxious than the full-on bedside glare of a lamp, but I’d just finished a book and didn’t feel like starting something new at 2:30 in the morning, especially since the particular book I’d read, The Gathering, had stirred up so many ghosts and funerals in my brain and was still settling in. In any case, I always have plenty of small change anxiety to sort through -- so many things pending, so many things that might go wrong.

I’m about to embark on a big project that’s making me awfully nervous, for example. And I’ve agreed to lead a three-day workshop and need to get back into teacher mode. And my daughter and her boyfriend have been staying with us fora few weeks, and now that I am finally used to it, they will be leaving again very soon.

Those are just the little things. Don’t think for a minute that I ignore war, hunger, or climate change.

Don’t think I don’t flagellate myself for not playing a bigger role in finding solutions, either. 

Seems like a lot of suffering is going on while I look at lizards and pink clouds and fill up sheets of blank paper.

Then again, in the middle of the night it’s easy to feel you are just an ephemeral being in an indifferent universe. What does any of it matter?

This is when I think it’s time to re-read Viktor Frankl, whose Man’s Search for Meaning remains one of my favorite books of all time. Frankl believed that the last of the human freedoms, when all else is stripped away, is the ability to choose one’s attitude in a given set of circumstances.He endured years in a concentration camp (which his own beloved wife did not survive) and yet was able to write this:

Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’sPrayer on his lips.

Frankl made a case for what he called “tragic optimism” – you’ve got your pain, you’ve got your guilt, and sure enough, there’s the inevitability of death -- he refers to these as the ‘tragic triad’ -- but acknowledging these does not necessarily mean our spirits are destroyed. Our task is to turn suffering into accomplishment (though I'm not clear on how unless to transcend and defy it), view guilt as an invitation to change oneself for the better, and derive from life’s transitory nature an incentive to take responsible action. We must say yes to life and join the ranks of decent people, people whom Frankl felt were in the minority (and in this I disagree, but I guess I’ve led a pretty sheltered life).

He also believed that we should not search for an abstract meaning in life, but rather that each of us is unique and irreplaceable and has a concrete “assignment” that demands fulfillment. Maybe it's a small role, but collectively, small things surely matter.Viktor Frankl has a lot more to say, and I've picked up his book again because it feels like some kind of tonic to me.

But back to this business of waking up in the night. Eventually, if I don’t get too worked up, I re-enter what I call Sleep, Part Two, and it’s lovely.

In the meantime, I’m just another woman swimming through the dark. I have a feeling there are others out there. Can you feel me?