From my journal for December 20, 1995
Seligman [the author of The Optimistic Child] suggests that people are able to deal with setbacks in a more optimistic way if they are living for something bigger than themselves. In the past, people lived for their families, for the Nation, for God — but these have become meaningless for many in modern times. Families are abusive, extended families have lost cohesiveness, Nations are oppressive and racist, God has disappeared behind scientific explanations. So I wonder, what am I living for? My first take is that I live an entirely selfish life, completely absorbed in my own comfort, and I’m depressed because I wallow in my own inner process all the time. I notice that the first thing I do with this new idea is make myself wrong. But yesterday I was thinking “How would I live my life if I had a belief that there was something larger than myself to live for?” and what I felt was a great sense of relief, that I was a participant in the human experiment, that I was doing my share just by continuing, each day, to do the little bit that has been entrusted to me: to take care of my health, love Dana, support Lynelle, walk the dog, feed the birds, wash the dishes. This is what I can do, this is my contribution. It doesn’t matter that I haven’t been able to “save the world,” other people, with better health and more confidence in themselves can work on the bigger tasks of “saving the world.”
As I get older, most of my energy has to be spent on keeping myself going. There’s very little left for more interesting activities. This is painful, because “just taking care of myself” isn’t much to live for. Where is the meaning?
The question of “self-involvement” — I think I seem so “self-involved” because my life is so narrow. I don’t have the energy to keep up with more “outside” pursuits. So I devote my intellect, my questioning mind, my passion to understand, to the territory of psyche, and my own psyche in particular because it’s right here, doesn’t take a lot of energy to get to. Sometimes I think of all this writing that I do here as valuable research into the human condition. Then it seems too bad if it doesn’t get published because no one will ever be able to make use of it. What’s the good of research if no one ever finds out?
And as for “family” — I do spend considerable time and effort on my family, it’s just that they’re not my blood family. I include Dana, Lynelle, Shenanigan, Beverly as family, and Sybil, Alice, Lucy, Christie, etc as “extended family” who I try to help when appropriate — and am learning to let them help me. For “Nation” I substitute community. I think political entities are unhealthy and refuse to support them. On the other hand, in teaching circle dance and building Neskaya, I am making a major contribution to my community. As for “religion” or “god,” although I “believe” in a divine foundation for all life, I don’t experience it very often. It’s not a belief that gives rise to appropriate feelings of safety or connection or worthiness. I think in fact my “belief” in God would be better stated as “I’m sure there’s meaning here, if I could only find it.” This is an interesting form of the pessimistic world view — I’m essentially blaming myself for not being able to find meaning in my life.
I was thinking recently that this way of blaming myself is a child’s way of trying to take control in a chaotic environment. or maybe a way to try to make sense of a chaotic environment, in which what I do does not have the results I had hoped for a lot of the time — in an inconsistent and confusing fashion so that finally I stop trying to look for evidence in the environment for why something didn’t work. I see that this continues to function in my assumption that it’s always “something I ate” when I feel bad. I discount environmental stressors such as air pollution, and external stressors such as listening to Lynelle’s pain. The notion that I am helpless, that I am at the mercy of a chaotic and unpredictable environment, is just too scary, certainly was too scary when I was a child, and is still pretty scary now that I’m an adult — still at the mercy of external forces, though the environment is actually much more orderly and predictable than what I lived with as a child, and I have now some adult coping strategies that actually work.
[I list the strategies for dealing with the noise of the planes. I can’t say they work very well.] And I can see why — any setback in either my health or a creative project offers an opportunity for sabotage by pessimistic self-talk which is reinforced by the learned helplessness from uncontrollable noise.