To the Bottom and Through

This one might be too, I don’t know - woo - for some. There is something I am thinking about that I find hard to articulate in precise ways - but - once again it has something to do with the function of strong emotion, and not merely the content.

Yesterday was a shitty and distressing day: One of my kids - who have both had some post-Covid symptoms- had a significant potential Covid exposure and moved into proactive in quarantine from the rest of the family for the week. The cat seemed to disappear and a screen door was open a crack -so we all spent several frantic hours searching the face of the small mountain we reside on, stomping through cactus, watching for snakes, frantically searching the shade under every bush and juniper, looking for any tell tale tufts of fur that would indicate that a hawk or a coyote had taken him only to find, on the fifth or sixth house search - the cat was hiding peacefully in the back corner a closet the entire time. The cat was fine and hopefully the kid will be too but the day was a ride. A frantic day. A last nerve day. A day where we could not hold it together and we wept or yelled and were overcome.

A day when the tables turn and the underneath is exposed. Where illusions of safety reveal their backside. And as a family that has survived a multitude of pretty impressive traumas together, we know there are days where the ugly end of the binary tries to convince us that it might be the only solid truth, even though we know better.

There is this element in our emotional lives - a strange inverse relationship to permanence and impermanence. A fear or a hope that whatever emotional state we are in will get stuck that way forever. A small threat or yearning to touch the the infinite seems to exist at the bottom, or top, or the edges of whatever mood moves through us.

When we grieve, we fear that the infinite will swallow us whole and we will never return. We suspect that despair and sorrow are bottomless and so we keep those wells covered tightly. We imagine that when we are suffused with well-being, or peace or filled with joy that the abundance we are appreciating will last forever. When fear over takes us, we wonder if the danger will keep compounding through out eternity.

Certainly chronicity exists in many forms, in our bodies, brains and hearts but even our relationship with chronic conditions shifts and moves overtime. We fight it, we embrace it, we adapt, we find palliation in various forms and for however briefly, we sleep when chronicity permits, we rest, we numb, we surrender, we escape, we accept.

I wonder about this “forever-ness” that sticks to non-chronic states even when we remember with our logical minds that feelings resolve, that emotions generally move and transport us from one place to another, and that nothing is as certain as change. I know better than to “believe” there is anything truly fixed about our moods. I know that eventually, one way or another, the weather in and around us, always changes. So why does this tiny particle of eternity exist and persist? Why does each emotion at least try to tempt us into believing that it is the only and eternal one, even if its seduction fails? Why do so many of our emotions so often “feel like an eternity” in one way or another? What good does it do?

I’m sure there are neurological processes that take place that have to do with our time perception in states of high arousal, but I’m more interested in its potential conscious uses than the causal explanation.

I’ve been employing a new strategy lately. When I notice a fear- or a hope-inducing whiff of the eternal infusing a mood, or coloring my perceptions - I move toward it and away from the mood.

The best way out is always through says Robert Frost. I wonder if the eternity we fear in our sufferings is the self-same infinity we want to cling to when we are filled with joy? I image a tiny hole, a small portal on the furthest edge of every emotional state where perhaps something infinite does exist? What if we breathe into the eternity that the feeling has carried in with it - or carried us to - that threatens to overcome us - and let the mood itself go? Maybe the only purpose of the feeling is to transport, to bring us to the edge, to the brink of what is finite in us and around us- and to fill our lungs with something eternal?

Maybe the momentary glimpse of the eternal is the point - always sitting there behind every funky mood, every string of good fortune, every trauma, every tragedy, every blessing.

When I can swim down to the absolute bottom of my suffering I find the deeper I go, I approach a relieving paradox down in the depths, something that reminds me that I am simultaneously held and included in infinity and that everything about me is utterly finite. When I reach my arms toward the sky in expansive celebration I arrive at a similar view, although the ride there is much more pleasant.

I can’t always do this. Sometimes I don’t have enough air in my lungs, or the seas are too choppy or my desire to have happiness last forever is just too sticky. Sometimes, as the moment swells in my breast I cannot separate the transportation from the destination. But sometimes I become curious about the sensation of infinity below, and above and all around and I wonder if the emotional color, the judgement about whether the ride is pleasant or unpleasant, a blessing or a curse is beside the point.

And fortunately last night, as I tried to decompress from a jangle-y and agitating day, I remembered that the way out is through the small portal on the farthest edge of feeling- the space where I can embrace for a moment, with great relief, all that is temporal and eternal at once, slept peacefully and woke up into a new day.