Thoughts On Navigating Despair

How may your despair be a way that you are trying to know what is unknowable?

I have been thinking a lot about despair lately and how quickly it can seize our hearts and take over our minds. It seems there is much to be despairing about, at the global level down to the interpersonal, and it can be hard to know what we can do about it when it all feels so consuming.

Where do we look for relief? Is it even ok to look for relief?

I think the initial tendency many of us have when we are in despair is to imagine that we are alone in it. We may want to withdrawal into ourselves, believing that no one can understand our suffering. We may even seek out the despair, looking for others who are in agreement with our reasons for despair and fall even more deeply into the pain.

It’s almost like the despair transports us to an earlier time in our lives, a time or moment where we experienced tremendous helplessness in the face of pain or terror. A time when no one was paying attention, no one cared, or no one could help.

In this way, despair is not just a feeling in the present, but a feeling of the past making its way into the present, trying to convince us that what happened then will happen again, now.

Because at least for me, whenever I notice despair come up, it is often because I am believing that the future is a foregone conclusion. I know what is going to happen, and it’s going to be all bad. 

And once again, I am helpless in the face of doom.

But how can we know that? How can we know that the future is going to be all bad?

Maybe, the appearance of despair is how our mind tries to know what is unknowable. It’s better to live in a world where all is bad now, than to risk hope and care and life, only for us to be surprised when something bad happens later on. And even though despair itself is a horrible feeling, it’s a feeling we have experienced before, so at least it’s familiar.

Which I think speaks to how terrifying uncertainty can be sometimes, that we would cling onto assumptions like it is facts rather than sit in the unknown.

The difficult truth of life though is that while can guess and make some assumptions about what is going to happen, we are not fortune tellers, and our guesses are often wrong.

At every turn we have a new encounter with the unknowns of life.

And I think in this knowing, there is also hope.

Because if we can appreciate that the appearance of despair has less to do with what is happening now, and more to do what once happened, maybe it gives us some space to face what is here a bit differently.

I believe that the invitation during these despairing times is to tend to our pains of the past so we can build something different for our future. 

Life often has a way of surprising us, of delighting us, of showing us moments that we could have never imagined. We are more resilient and capable than we were then, there are more options now than there was then.

So let us hold our despair gently, because we are deserving of gentleness and care. And maybe we can also try to hold it with curiosity, because while it despair is giving us important information about our past and our present, it is not necessarily telling us the future. And when we can get curious with its appearance rather than taking it at face value, maybe we can also find space to face the unknown with a bit more compassion.